Recent Posts

Best practices: a meaningless term

Chad White wrote an article for MediaPost about best practices which parallels a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about how the email marketing industry treats best practices.

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Size isn't the only metric

MarketingSherpa has a case study up today about a company that took an aggressive stance on re-engagement that reduced their house list size by over 95%. While the size of the list went down, online sales doubled.
The whole article is a lesson in how to do email right. They are sending relevant and engaging mail to their subscribers. They kept the addresses of people who wanted the mail, but designed a new program from the ground up. All of the key points I, and others, keep talking about is present in their new program.

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Comments on Holomaxx post

I’m putting together a longer analysis of the Holomaxx case that will look at the claims against the various defendants. There’s some deep mis-understanding of how various things works (hint: wiretapping? not so much).
There was one comment from “The Other Barry” about complaints that I think bears highlighting.

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Standing in the stadium

If you distill marketing down to its very essence what you find is everyone battling for a targets attention. Everything marketers do is to get “mindshare” or, in normal people terms, attention. The goal is to get people to remember your product over all the other products out there.
Many email marketers seem to think that increasing the frequency of mail is the most successful way to get attention from their recipients. What would happen, then, if every email marketer started sending more email? Would this really get more attention from recipients?
I don’t think so.
Increasing mail frequency is like standing up to see better in a stadium. One person stands up (increases frequency) and that person sees better than they did before. But if everyone stands up (increases frequency), then everyone is back to where they were and everyone is back to not being able to see.

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The myth of the low complaint rate

I have been reading the complaints filed by Holomaxx and will have some analysis and information about them probably Monday or Tuesday next week. I’ve been keeping an eye on the press and something that Ken Magill said caught my eye.

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Birthdays and World Series Parades

Steve whisked me away for a surprise birthday dinner and night in the city. Then we got caught in the crowds for the Giant’s parade and, well, no blogging yesterday or today. Back tomorrow.

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Email appending

Mickey talks about appending and why it’s not a good practice.

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Don't be Amelia

I have an adorable cat that I ‘taught’ that I would pet her if she tapped me on the arm or shoulder with her paw. It was cute for a while, but then she got more and more demanding. Eventually, she was clawing at my clothes and skin to get attention and petting.
It’s gotten to the point where I have to put a stop to it. She’s just getting too destructive to me and my clothing. So over the last two weeks I’ve been trying to only reward those touches that don’t involve claws and giving her a stern “NO CLAWS” when she does try to claw me.
As I was sitting here this afternoon, going through yet another round of NO CLAWS with her, I realized that my interactions with her were eerily similar to email marketing.
You see, Amelia started using her claws to get my attention because I didn’t always respond to her gentle taps. But claws hurt, and were a problem, so I would respond. This is exactly like marketers who don’t see a response to their email marketing campaigns and thus up the aggressiveness of those campaigns. More mail, more frequency, stronger offers, anything to get a response out of recipients.
Eventually, though, the recipient finally gets annoyed. The aggressive “taps” result in spam complaints. The sender has pushed the recipient from “it’s not so bad” to “make this sender stop bugging me.”
Email marketing is interruption marketing and there is only so much recipients will tolerate. And, trust me, few email marketers are as cute as my Amelia Cat.

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More information on arrests

Terry Zink has a more detailed post on some of the spammer arrests and takedowns that have happened recently.
In addition to the events I mentioned yesterday, authorities arrested an Armenian man suspected of running the Bredolab botnet. Unfortunately, the arrest has not stopped the spam with the malware payload.
These are issues that many ISP abuse and postmaster desks deal with on a daily basis. Their filtering schemes and policies are in place to protect customers from the mob, and criminals. I don’t think enough marketers and senders understand exactly how much the ISPs are dealing with and why many ISPs don’t really care that “mail is taking 12 hours to get to the inbox.” They are dealing with much more important things.

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The dark side of email marketing

Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.

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