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Leads, leads, leads!

There are a number of places that will sell business leads from data they’ve compiled, crawled or crowd-sourced. How great is that? Anyone can buy a list of targeted business information to use to further their business goals! Awesome! Great! Step right up and get your lead here!
But how accurate is that information really?
One of the bigger companies, which allows for public searches, is Zoominfo. I did some lookups recently just to see what their data is like. My conclusion? If the data they have on me is any indication of the overall accuracy of their data, companies are way better off just setting light to a pile of money in their parking lot instead of giving it to Zoominfo.
Let’s look at the data they have on me. When you go to their homepage and enter my name in, you get about 2 dozen profiles. Looking through them, there are a number that describe me.
Laura Atkins; MCRS rep. Fair enough, I do mention MCRS on a few of my webpages and was recently on their board of directors. What I can’t figure out is why they think the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society is run out the Chesterfield County Business Development office. The MCRS is neither a business nor is it located in the state of Virginia. It’s not even located in the same time zone as Virginia. Strike 1 for Zoominfo.
Laura T. Atkins; Founding Partner. This one is the reference that is most clearly me. Zoominfo claims this information was “community contributed.” OK, so someone uploaded their address book and my name and contact info was in it. But they have my company listed as simply “Word.” Sure, Zoominfo went and scraped a bunch of info off our website, but that isn’t reflected in the actual listing. Strike 2 for Zoominfo.
Laura Atkins; Spamtacular. This one is one of my favorites. I’m listed as associated with Spamtacular. Spamtacular is a blog run by my former co-worker Mickey Chandler. Mickey’s currently working for a major ESP, but he blogs about email, spam and delivery under the Spamtacular.com domain. And, in fact, the “association” is that he lists me as part of the Spamtacular blogroll. But Zoominfo claims they have an email address and phone number for me associated with Spamtacular. According to Mickey, Zoominfo have repeatedly attempted to mail laura at spamtacular. It’s not just my email address they’ve pulled out of nether orifices, though. The Spamtacular corporate information is, if anything, more inaccurate than the MCRS data. Spamtacular is not and has never been registered anywhere near the state of California.  Strike 3 for Zoominfo.
But wait! Just because they’ve struck out doesn’t mean they’re going to stop swinging or walk off the field.
Laura Atkins; Context Magazine. I did an interview with Context Magazine back in 2002, and Zoominfo claims they have a phone number for me. I suspect this is not my phone number, but, rather, is the main number for Context Magazine.
There are a couple of other, less interesting profiles for me: Spamcon Foundation, Deliverability.com. All are demonstrably me, but with no real contact information it’s not going to help anyone get in touch with me.
I have to admit, I’m actually surprised at just how totally inaccurate the data about me is. I’m not that hard to find. Zoominfo has 6 listings I can clearly identify as me. In those 6 listings:

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World IPv6 launch day

Today is world IPv6 launch day. A group of ISPs, network hardware manufacturers and web companies permanently enabled IPv6 for their products and services.
What’s this got to do with email? According to a post on the NANOG mailing list the very first email to arrive at the Comcast IPv6 mailserver was received a minute after the server was turned on. This email was spam and was caught by Cloudmark’s filters.
Comcast goes on to assure readers that more mail came in and not all of it was spam.
But, yes, the first email sent to Comcast over IPv6 was spam. Welcome to the future.
 

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Things people hate about your email marketing

I found this article over on Hubspot, and I think it covers a lot of why people hate email marketing quite well.

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Spamtraps are not the problem

Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them?
My answer is always the same. I cannot provide a list of spamtrap addresses or tell you what addresses to remove. Instead what I do is help clients work through their email address lists to identify addresses that do not and will not respond to offers. I also will help them identify how those bad addresses were added to the list in the first place.
Spamtraps on a list are not the problem, they’re simply a symptom of the underlying data hygiene problems. Spamtraps are a sign that somehow addresses are getting onto a list without the permission of the address owner. Removing the spamtrap addresses without addressing the underlying flaws in data handling may mean resolving immediate delivery issues, but won’t prevent future problems.
Improving data hygiene, particularly for senders who are having blocking problems due to spam traps, fixes a lot of the delivery issues. Sure, cleaning out the traps removes the immediate blocking issue, but it does nothing to address any other addresses on the list that were added without permission. In fact, many of my clients have discovered an overall improvement in delivery after addressing the underlying issues resulting in spamtraps on their lists.
Focusing on removing spamtraps, rather than looking at improving the overall integrity of data, misses the signal that spamtraps are sending.

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Congrats!

Congratulations go out to Matt Blumberg for being named one of the top entrepreneurs for 2012 by Crain’s New York Business!

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AOL update

A reader has been talking with AOL about the mtain* responses that people were receiving. AOL has said both responses mentioning mtain-*.r1000.mx.aol.com are actually DNY:T1 bounces that are being presented incorrectly. Both responses should be treated the same as 421 DYN:T1.

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Permission.

The discussion of “permission” and “opt-in” is one that keeps popping up again and again. I am working on posting some more thoughts about permission and consent. While I’m still thinking about what new I can say, here is a list of articles Word to the Wise I’ve posted in the past on permission:

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AOL … again

A number of senders are reporting that they’re getting unusual responses from AOL servers. The responses include:

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Another reason not to use no-reply@

A story from someone handling support at a UK company that regularly sends out transactional email with no-reply@company in the From: line.

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The challenge of integrated marketing

There are dozens of ways for companies to interact with customers these days. Business Insider recently posted this infographic, only to realize that they’d left off Pintrest.

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