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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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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Truth of Consequences

“If you want to use another means that violates the law, and every common definition of “spam”, then by all means, go ahead. You can enjoy fines and being added to the ROKSO database,” says a comment on my recent COI blog post. It’s both disconcerting and entirely predictable.

My post was a discussion of what to do with addresses that don’t confirm. Data tells us that there is some value in those addresses – that there are people who won’t confirm for some reason but will end up purchasing from an email. Using COI leaves some fraction of revenue on the table as it were. My post was a short risk analysis of things to think about when making decisions about continuing to mail to people who don’t confirm.
Mentioning COI often brings the only-COI-mail-is-not-spam zealots out of the woodwork, as it did in this case. In this case, we have the commenter first asserting that failure to do COI is a violation of CAN SPAM (it’s not). When this was pointed out, he started arguing with two people who have been actively fighting spam for 20 years (including running a widely used blocklist). Finally, he ends up with the comment asserting that anyone not using COI will end up on ROKSO. It’s as if he thinks that statement will fear other commenters into not having opinions. It can’t because everyone in the discussion, except possibly him, knows that it’s not true.
The worst problem with folks like the commenter is that they think asserting horrible consequences will make people cower. First off, people don’t react well to threats. Secondly, this is a hollow threat and most people reading this blog know it.
There are millions of mailing lists not using COI and have zero risk of ever getting on ROKSO. The only thing hollow threats do is make people not pay attention to what you have to say. Well, OK, and have me write a blog post about how those threats are bad because they’re completely removed from reality.
Exaggerating or lying about consequences is not just wrong, it’s stupid. “Do this or else BAD THING,” is awesome, up until someone decides they’re not going to do this and the bad thing never happens. It makes people less likely or pay any attention to you in the future. It certainly means your opinions and recommendations are not going to be listened to in the future.
I probably go too far the other direction. I can spend too much time contextualizing a recommendation. It’s one of the things I’m trying to get better about. No, client doesn’t need a 4 page discussion of the history of whatever, they just need 2 lines of what they should do. If they need the context, I can provide it later.
In order to effectively modify behavior consequences have to be real. Threats of consequences are meaningless. Any toddler knows this, and can quite accurately model when mom means it and when she’s just threatening.
Risk analysis is not about modifying behavior. It’s about analyzing a particular issue and providing necessary information so the company action understands potential consequences and the chance those risks will happen. The blog post about COI was not intended to modify anyone’s behavior. I know there are companies out there successfully maintaining two mail streams: one COI and one not. I know there are other companies out there successfully mailing only single opt-in mail. I know there are companies with complex strategies to verify identity and address ownership. And I smile every time I walk into a retail store and they ask me if my email address is still X and if I want to make any changes to it.
Lying about consequences does nothing to modify behavior. All it does is diminish the standing and audience of the liar. Be truthful about the consequences of an action or lack of action. Don’t make up threats in order to bully people into doing what you think is right. Sooner or later they’re going to realize that you don’t know what you’re talking about and start to ignore you.

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Tools aren’t a luxury

I was on the phone with a colleague recently. They were talking about collecting a bit of data over the weekend and mentioned how great it was they had the tools to be able to do this. Coincidentally, another colleague mentioned that when the subscription bombing happened they were able to react quickly because they had a decent tool chain. I’ve also been working with some clients who are dealing with compliance issues but don’t have the tools they need.

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