Recent Posts

Spam or not spam

I have been a bit behind on my blog reading recently, and am slowly going through my RSS feed catching up with what everyone has had to say about spam in the last few weeks.
One of the articles that caught my attention was a post from VerticalResponse discussing the response to a marketing campaign from one of their customers. It seems to me the point of the post is to defend the VerticalResponse mail to the customer. The mail VerticalResponse sent was not spam. Why this is true is not made clear, other than the mail was not pills spam, phishing or porn.
Contrasting with that article is a post a friend pointed out to me today. This article goes to the other extreme, and seems to say that any one-to-many email is spam and should not be sent. While trying to find his point, the author does take the step of exempting any opt-in marketing from his definition. The confusing bit is that the statistics he is using are compiled by MailerMailer, who have a very clear anti-spam policy and allow only permission based marketing.
What both posts seem to be missing is that, these days, spam is in the eye of the receiver, not the sender. There are customers who groan every time they receive mail from their vendor. Eventually, they may lash out at a sender and complain about the email. At that point, a sender is now dealing with an angry person, and arguing the mail is no spam is not going to diffuse the situation. On the flip side, there are people who are very happy to receive mail, even advertising and marketing mail, from vendors. Even if they do not “open” the mail (read: load images in the email), they may be opening, reading and acting on the offers in the email.
Email marketing is a valuable tool, when it is done correctly and focuses on the receiver’s needs and wants. It is when marketers ignore the individuals they are mailing that they are more likely to see complaints or problems.

Yahoo update

It has been quite a while since I have had the opportunity to share information about Yahoo here on the blog, but there is new information to share.
Yesterday, Mark Risher from Yahoo spent some time talking with people about all things spam over at Yahoo. Matt from EmailKarma posted the transcripts as well as some excerpts from the talk. The really interesting bit, for me, was confirmation that Yahoo will be bringing back their FBL in the next few weeks. I have been hearing rumors about the return of the FBL for a while now, and it seems the general timeline (fall-ish) is accurate.
Speaking of the feedback loop, there have also been rumors that Yahoo is not accepting any changes to existing feedback loops. This does not seem to be the case. According to an internal person, companies who are currently in the beta FBL program can make changes to the program by contacting the postmaster team.

Preventing subscriber remorse

Mark Brownlow has a great article up about how senders can stop subscribers from regretting they signed up for mail. He starts off saying

We're back!

Sorry for the downtime, the machine running the blog had a motherboard fail and for various reasons (deadlines, family emergencies, etc) it has taken a bit of time to get the blog moved to another machine.
I do apologize for the time the blog was gone. Regular blogging will return tomorrow.

Paypal fixes unsubscribes

Through the grapevine, I have heard that PayPal is actually complying with the new CAN SPAM rulemaking and offering one-click unsubscribes.

AOL announces web support tool

Yesterday, David announced a new suite of tools to help senders troubleshoot blocking problems more efficiently.

List Attrition

DJ over at Bronto blog has a post up about list churn / list attrition. She quotes a statistic published by Loren from MediaPost (the original post is behind a subscription wall) that a list will lose 30% of their subscribers year over year. This is similar to a statistic that I use, but the context I have seen the published statistic in is slightly different. DJ offers suggestions on how to reduce this churn. All the suggestions are great, but I think that they slightly miss the point. There are multiple processes that can be described as list churn. One is churn DJ addresses, that is people unsubscribe from a mailing list. The other is people abandon their email addresses. Individual mailers have some control over the first type of churn, but almost no control over the second.
I think the study Loren was quoting describes the second phenomenon not the first. In 2002, ReturnPath published a study that showed 31% of people changed email addresses in a single year. Understand, this does not mean that 31% of recipients on any particular list will actively decide to unsubscribe from a list or report it as spam or otherwise unsubscribe from that list. This is 31% of all email address owners will get a new address and abandon their current one. There are a few reasons for the churn.

CAN SPAM rules take effect

The new CAN SPAM rules take effect today. EmailKarma has a list of articles detailing the new rules. These rules govern handling of opt-outs and establish a “sender” category for purposes of physical address and opt-outs.

Another benefit of email marketing

Kevin Hillstrom over at MineThatData blog talks about using email metrics and other customer information to not market to people who cost a company money.

PayPal Followup

I thought I would give everyone a brief update on my continuing saga with trying to unsubscribe from PayPal’s marketing list. Because of what I do, I have some options not available to the average recipient. One of the things I did is ask people I know if they had any contacts at PayPal who may be able to address this issue.
I was given an internal contact at PayPal by a colleague who works at one of the certification companies. I sent the PayPal contact a brief summary of my experience. She explained she was not in a department that handled email any more, but that she forwarded my mail on to the responsible people. A little later I received another message saying that I had been unsubscribed and they were examining the tapes of my call. She also mentioned that their unsubscribe process would be changed “sometime in mid-July.” I was not given any details.
A colleague who attended the recent AOTA meeting in Seattle offered this comment.