Marketing with Technology and More

The Power of Seven Words

Wow!  When the team at SubscriberMail assembled our latest white paper titled “The Seven Dirty Words You Shouldn’t Say in Subject Lines (Plus 100 others you shouldn’t use either)”, we had no idea they would draw the level of interest and discussion they have.

I’d like to make sure you understand what this list is (and what it is not).  The list is not (as reported by some media outlets) a list of words that will definitely get your email blocked by spam filters.  Will these words have an impact, yes.  Some spam filters examine the subject line, and these words will weigh in the scoring.  These words also should be avoided because of the potential of filtering on another level, the human one.  This is where some of the discussion about this list misses the mark.

In our experience the subject line can make or break an email campaign.  Creativity and testing are critical components to the success of an email.  While it is easy to use many of the words and phrases on the list, they could eliminate a message from connecting to the recipient on many levels, so why risk using them. 

Tom Gray who writes The Evolving Internet Marketer gets it.  His key point: never use words in your subject line that YOU would block.   

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports also is on target when he points out in his post that there is a danger in over emphasizing one aspect (subject line words in this case).  Delivery is a dynamic puzzle of interconnected pieces.  You have to address all of the issues.

Melinda Krueger, aka the “Email Diva,” states “there is far more to deliverability that the 7 dirty words would have you believe.”  I completely agree with her point that email deliverability is about many different factors.  Our white paper never mentioned deliverability.  While banning dirty words is a start, best practices require email senders to test subject lines, use dynamic content and remain relevant if they want their emails delivered.

I also agree that you should use an email service provider (ESP) to help with your deliverability.  Of course (with great bias) I think that ESP should be SubscriberMail.

Keep It Clean

List hygiene has always been important, but based on what we heard at the Authentication Summit held in Chicago late last month, it is now critical.  The details are spelled out in a great article by Ken Magill, but the bottom line is that Microsoft is starting to force your hand by turning abandoned Hotmail and MSN addresses into Spamtraps.  What this means is if you don't clean these addresses off your list, you are likely to get blacklisted, and delivery will stop.

I can't say that I agree with the process, but I can say it is now more important than ever to keep you list clean.

The Unintentional Spammer

My friends at FeedBurner  ran into a bit of a problem yesterday.  An employee, with the best of intentions created an email campaign by gathering email addresses from blogs and sending messages to the owners of those blogs about their business (related to blogging).  The messages were sent to about 90 people, and of course, it did not take long for people to start complaining, and bloggers to gather on the warpath BlogHerald published about it, and it rapidly appeared in other places too.

Now I know the folks at Feedburner.  Good folks, great company, great product. The last thing in the world they would ever condone as a company is taking an unethical marketing approach, and sending out Spam.  The reality is however, that this can happen to any company.  Employees don't always know what email marketing laws are, and even if they do, their best intentions may take over, and not even think that they might be sending out a message that would be considered Spam.  Well here is a quick lesson in damage control.

Dick Costello, FeedBurner's CEO was immediately on the case.  The first thing he did is admit they made a mistake.  He posted the admission on their blog , and also commented about it on the blogs where he found it mentioned.  The bottom line is by today, the blogosphere seems to have calmed down, and what could have been a major word of mouth disaster was difused with something very simple - honestly admitting a mistake.  Hats off to the folks at FeedBurner for addressing this issue in such a professional manner.  There is a lesson in this for all of us.

We Won't Tolerate Spammers

We are firmly committed to permission-based emailing, and have spoken on more than one occasion about the danger of sending unsolicited email.  We have never warned about what happened to Russia's most infamous spammer .

Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should

I hate losing business, but sometimes losing business is the best way to stay in business in the long run.  We lost a piece of business this week.  It is sort of a mutual parting of the ways over what I think in this day and age is something that anyone who wants to stay in the email business needs to do.  It seems simple, but don't mail without permission.

This particular client has a great business model, and a very interesting niche.  The problem is that his market is heating up and he is suddenly seeing new competition.  Rather than do what he can to build up the business and innovate in ways to stay ahead of the competition, he decided to do something that in my mind was just plain stupid.  He wanted to email people who he has no relationship with, have not opted in, but are in his target industries.  His comment, "these people want to hear from us, they just don't know it yet."

His rationale, CAN SPAM allows me to mail anyone once, and unless they opt out, I can keep sending to them emails.  Again, just plain stupid.  Even if the law allows it, doesn't mean that doing it is the right thing to do.  At a time where most ethical email marketing clients are looking to shore up permission through double opt-in's (or in some cases even asking for customers to re-opt in.  Why would anyone want to look at their business from such a short term perspective that they are willing to risk being viewed as a Spammer (even if by a legal definition they aren't.   - Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

A Whole Lot of Shake=up Going on

I don’t want to rail on the Direct Marketing Association, but as noted by one of the comments on my earlier posting titled “DMA/AIM – New Direction, The press machine has been cranking at DMA headquarters this week.   Several senior staffers were let go and there was a shuffling of the management team.  It will be interesting to see how the changes impact the associations relationship with the email and online community.

The DMA’s position has long been at odds with legitimate permission email marketing community, but my sense has always been that this has been a position embraced by old-time leadership. I don’t think they “got it,” and figured that old world concepts (mailing tons of direct mail pieces to everyone you could find that fit within your target market) worked in a new world.  They don’t! While I am encouraged by the change, I am also concerned.

One DMA announcement is that the CEO of another email company (who shall remain nameless), was added to the DMA ethics board.  I'm hoping that this person's take on permission alligns with the email community, and not with the old guard at DMA.  While I applaud the addition of an emailier  and hope that this appointment will help the DMA see the way the ethical email community is trying to help clients email the right way.

At heart,  I am a supporter of the DMA, have been a member for a long time, and owe an alligance to the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation (DMEF) for getting me into the industry,  I hope they get it right!

Don' Tread on Me (or at least on my free speech)

As much as I hate Spam, I have felt for a long time that commercial internet services providers (ISP’s) that block incoming mail on an ad-hoc basis were stepping very close to a line protected by the First Amendment. Many legitimate mailers, who have been granted permission to send email by the recipient, find that there mail never makes it through because their messages were filtered out by the ISP.  This is often based on reasons that are not always shared with either the recipient or the mailer.  So if you and I agree to communicate, there is a party in the middle that can intercept the message (without telling me), and fail to deliver the message (without informing you).

Today the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), issued a white paper titled Noncommercial Email Lists: Collateral Damage in the Fight Against Spam.  While this paper focuses on the impact on the not-for-profit world, the problem goes much deeper.  Every day people who want to receive email don’t get it.

As I read the write-up, I realized the power that is being vested in the ISP’s.  An ISP manager who holds a specific belief could screen out mail from any organization that holds a position that is contrary to their position.  Doesn’t sound like free speech to me. On a related article on the EFF site, there is a great example of how powerful this can be.  A bookstore owner provided free email accounts to his customers, then blocked and reviewed all incoming email from Amazon.com.  Not cool.

EFF presents some solid suggestions for both mail senders and ISP’s.  Now, getting the ISP’s to listen to what they say…well that is a different story.

Tomorrow I am off to Atlanta for the In-Box event.  Will fill you in on some of the events at the show in futures posts.

The Accidental Spammer

I flew from Chicago to New Jersey yesterday for a meeting today. I have this habit of learning as much as possible about the person sitting next to me on an airplane. I have met some amazing people, and had some great experiences (as well as made some of my biggest business deals) this way.

My seatmate was a nice man on his way back from a trip to Japan. He worked for the company that lay’s fiber optic cable across the ocean’s (I didn’t even know this was done anymore). When he asked me what I did, I told him that I was in the email business. He promptly replied, oh I was in that business once, but I sold it.,

I was obviously intrigued. Well it seems that several months ago, he purchased an email list (which he said was opt-in) of one million names that came bundled with the software needed to broadcast messages, as well as a web site to sell them from. I thought this guy was taken for a ride, but it must have been a while ago. Turns out it was only a few months ago. He said he sold the list to several companies, enough to recoup the $400 investment he had made to “start this business.” He then sold the entire business for $150 to someone else.

Now I’ve read about these scams, but I have never met anyone who was taken in by them. This man was obviously well educated, and well read, yet he could not resist the lure of get rich quick scam artists that turned him into the accidental spammer. He said that he tried to send to the list himself once. Within a half hour, his ISP, shut him down, the major email providers bounced his mail, and he could not understand what he was doing wrong.

What amazes me about this story, is that it points out the complete lack of understanding some business people have about email marketing, despite everything that is published. It just goes to show that email marketing can lure in the unsuspecting and turn them into spammers.