Audiences, targeting and signups

A few weeks ago we closed on our new house in Dublin. This weekend we’re going to one of those ‘home shows’ where people try and sell you all sorts of things for your home. We know there are some things we want to do with the house so we’re headed out to the convention centre this weekend. Tickets are “free” but they ask for contact information, including an email address.

Given who we are, this sparked a discussion about the email address we wanted to give them. Right now, we’re in a place where we actually want a lot of email about home stuff. We know we need attic insulation and a new heating system and furniture and so yeah, email from the show vendors is good right now. But we also know that this email address will be traded and sold for the next 20 years. We could set up a tagged address and just route it to /dev/null when we’re tired of mail. Instead, we decided to set up a whole new address to use for house things, one that we could set to bounce when we were bored of getting house related mail.

It will be interesting to see what kind of mail we get over time to this address. Are the marketers smart enough to change what they send based on how long they’ve had our address? Or will the mail change with the seasons? Both are legitimate marketing techniques. It will also be interesting to see how they handle this data in the context of GDPR.

In this case, we’re a clear target for this marketing and, in many ways, receptive to all the stuff they’re selling. We’re receptive, they’re going to send us email, it’s all good. We know what we’re getting into, they are getting good subscribers. Everybody is happy. We’ll continue to be happy with the mail until we’re moved in and feel like all the bits are finished and then we’ll either unsubscribe from everything or, more likely, just turn the address off.

Targeting.

Sometimes I don’t know how savvy marketers always are about their audience, though. Two recent examples come to mind.

A friend of mine got engaged last week. She’s looking at planning a wedding. This is another major opportunity for marketing to collect information and bridal shows are huge. Many brides of the digital generation know what they’re getting into when the give an email address to a bridal magazine or to a bridal show. I’ve seen some discussions that the right thing to do is open a gmail account just to handle wedding planning and subscriptions. But, like buying and furnishing a new house, a wedding is a limited amount of time. Anywhere from a few days to 2 or so years. From what I’ve heard, though, not all wedding vendors are that great about sunsetting addresses.

In another case, I was talking with a startup. They’re a fairly new news / political insight organization that was working with some marketing experts to grow their lists. They decided to use co-reg and it was successful increasing their list size by an order of magnitude. It also tanked their delivery. Part of my end of the conversation was about how to fix their delivery. But that was only part of the conversation. A much bigger piece of the conversation was walking them through some discussion of what audience they were looking for and whether or not co-reg was a good way to find that audience.

Fundamentally, though, “people we can get to give us an email address” do not always equate to “people who want our mail.” Recently one of my ESP clients was dealing with a customer who had a lot of delivery challenges and we eventually worked out the problem set of addresses was from wifi logins. Yes, lots of places expect an email address for a wifi login. Lots of users don’t want any mail based on that login. If those addresses become too big a portion of the mailing list, then it can tank delivery for all subscribers.

Part of the challenge of running a successful email marketing program is understanding your subscribers and your collection processes. Email is an amazing communication channel that is constantly evolving. The audience is evolving in what they want and what their needs are. Technology is evolving. Filters are evolving to handle the morphing threats. What worked yesterday might work today but not tomorrow. Marketers have to evolve, too, or risk not reaching the inbox or their audience.

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Back to the office!

I’m back in the office after a busy June. The 2 continent, 3 city tour was unexpectedly extended to a 4th city thus I was out most of last week as well.
What was I doing? We spent a week in Dublin, which is an awesome and amazing city and I love it a little bit more every time we visit. After Dublin I jetted off to Chicago, where I spoke at ActiveCampaign’s first user conference.
The talk I did for ActiveCampaign was about how we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how email is filtered, particularly at the consumer ISPs. In order reach the inbox. we need to think beyond IP or domain reputation. We need to stop thinking of filters as a way of sorting good mail from bad mail. I touched a little on these concepts in my What kind of mail do filters target? blog post.
The shift in filtering is changing how email reaches the inbox and what we can and should be monitoring. At the same time, the amount of data we can get back from the ISPs is decreasing. This means we’re looking at a situation when our primary delivery fixes can’t be based on feedback from the filters. This is, I think, going to be an ongoing theme of blog posts over the next few months.

The next trip was to spend 2 days onsite at a client’s office. These types of onsite training are intense but I do enjoy them. As this was mostly client specific, there isn’t much I can share. They did describe it as a masterclass in deliverability, so I think it was also intense for them.
That was the planned 2 continent, 3 city tour. The last city was a late addition of a more personal nature. We headed downstate to join my cousin and her family in saying goodbye to my uncle. He was an amazing man. A larger than life, literal hero (underwater EOD, awarded the silver star) whom I wish I had known better. Most of what I remember is how much he loved and adored my aunt.
I’ll be getting back into the swing of blogging over the next few days. It’s good to be back and not looking at traveling in the short term.

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State of Email Deliverability

I had other posts in the pipeline, but saw a link to the Litmus 2017 State of Email Deliverability Report and decided that deserved a mention here.
There’s all sorts of interesting data there, and well worth a download and read. I was, of course, interested in the “most problematic subscriber acquisition sources.” Senders having blocking issues or blacklist problems in the past 12 months use list rental, co-reg and purchased lists more often than senders that didn’t have problems.

Senders acquiring addresses through list rental are 104% more likely to be blacklisted than senders not using list rental. And they’re 47% more likely to be blocked.
These stats are the primary reason that most ESPs don’t allow list rentals, purchased or co-reg lists. They cause blocking and blacklisting. The ESP ends up having to deal with lots of problems and clean up the mess.
I’m unsurprised that lead generation by giving something away (a report, ebook, whatever) is related to problems. Most of these forms do little to no data checking and accept any and all fake data. There are fairly simple ways to enforce better data, but that does limit the spread of the information.
I am surprised to see signup through direct mail and catalog sales is so bad. Unless maybe people don’t know how to say no when asked for an email address over the phone. I know it seems awkward to say no when asked for an email address. Maybe some folks are giving fake addresses. I sometimes say I don’t have email, or just tell them no, they don’t need one.
The white paper itself is well worth a read. Go download it yourself (but don’t give them a fake email address!).

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Equifax compromise and their insecure response

Today it was announced that someone infiltrated Equifax earlier this year and stole 143,000,000 identities. These identities include names, birthdates, and addresses, at a minimum. Details are available at your favorite news site.
What I want to talk about is the website they’ve put up to address the issue. This website is Yet Another Example of how the financial services industry trains users to be phishing victims.
Equifax set up a website for people concerned about the possibility of identity theft after this major data leak. The URL, as distributed by the press and linked to from Equifax’s own website is https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com.
When I was first sent to the site, I thought it was a phishing site because there is absolutely no way to confirm this site is owned and managed by Equifax. Zero. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that the site isn’t owned by Equifax. And most of the rest of the evidence relies on trusting that the hackers still don’t have some level of access to Equifax systems.

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