Transactional mail can be spam

Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out.

Enter the anniversary, birthday or holiday message. If a message is sent once per year and is based around some event, then it’s classified as transactional. But these messages aren’t really transactional. There’s nothing the recipient did. The only “transaction” is the passage of time.

These kind of fake transactional messages are just legal spam, particularly if the recipient has opted out of marketing mail.

I mentioned this on the email geeks slack channel, along with the comment that if companies were going to ignore preferences they should at least offer recipients something for reading their spam. One smart person pointed out that if the messages contained rewards, like a percentage off, then it’s not transactional mail any more and it’s a clear violation of CAN SPAM and other laws.

There are, of course, legitimate transactional messages. My favourite definition of transactional message is a message confirming or completing an action initiated by the recipient. The whole point of carving out transactional messages from CAN SPAM is for the recipient, not for the sender. Any truly transactional mail, therefore, must benefit the recipient more than the sender.

There are also cases where one time emails benefit the recipient, but are not generated due to a direct interaction by the recipient. One common case of this is messages alerting users that a particular product is back in stock. These messages are wanted by the user, and they benefit the user, but the timing of their send isn’t related to a user’s action. Timing is dictated by restocking timelines. In discussions with clients, I describe these types of messages as triggered rather than transactional.

Transactional mail must center the recipient. If a recipient has opted out from mail from a company, then they probably don’t want to receive marketing mail, even if the subject line is Happy Birthday or Happy Anniversary.

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Outreach or spam?

This showed up in my mailbox earlier today:
Pluckyou
The tweet in question
pluckyou2
From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.”
Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a # that you think is relevant to your product doesn’t mean that I want to get your spam. I also know it’s hard to get attention and find prospects; I’m a small business owner, too and I need to market my own services. But spamming isn’t a good idea. Ever.
There’s been a significant increase in this kind of spam “to help your business” lately. It’s a rare day I don’t get something from some company I’ve never heard of trying to sell me their newest product. It might be something if they tried a contact or two and then went away. But they’ll send mail for weeks or months without getting an answer. Look, silence IS an answer and it means you need to go away and leave your prospects alone.
Unfortunately, there are services out there that sell a product that let you “automatically follow up” with your prospects. Pluck up there uses one of them, as that’s who’s handling all the links in the message. In fact, if you go to the bare domain (qcml.io) they talk a good anti-spam game. “Die, spammers, die.” I reported the message to them. I’m not expecting them to actually do anything, and I’m not expecting a response.
It’s just spam under another name. There’s no pretense that it’s anything else. Even if it’s sent in a way that makes it look like a real person typed the message, like QuickMail offers. “All emails will come straight out of your personal inbox as though you typed them yourself.” As if you typed them yourself.
The worst part is there’s no real way to stop the mail. I can’t unsubscribe. The companies selling the software don’t provide any guidance to their customers about what the law requires. Take the message from Pluck that started the post. It violates CAN SPAM in multiple ways. Moreover, the address they used is not publicly associated with my twitter handle, which means they’re doing some harvesting somewhere. That means treble penalties under CAN SPAM.
I could reply and ask them to stop mailing me. I’ve done that a couple times with a message that says, “Please don’t email me any more.” I’ve got to tell you, some people get really mad when you ask them not to email you. Some just say yes, but others are really offended that you asked them to stop and get abusive. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t ask any more because of that one person who decides to harass, threaten and scream at me. Sure, it’s maybe 1 in 5, but I don’t have the time or energy to figure out who is going to be receptive and who isn’t. I don’t have time for that. No one has time for that.
I’m expecting that filters are going to catch up eventually and these types of mail will be easier to filter out. Until then, though, small business owners like myself are stuck in a place where we have to deal with spam distracting us from our business. At least I get blog content out of it.
 
 
 

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