In the annals of Bad Marketing Ideas comes this attempt by Capital One to define any mail they choose to send to be transactional mail:

Kevin, a 40-year-old from Sacramento, Calif., likes to keep a tidy inbox. He’s very deliberate about removing himself from mailing lists and anything else that might clog up his e-mail. So recently, when he received a marketing pitch from his credit card company, Capital One, he quickly asked to be removed from its list. The response he got surprised him.

“We bring these offers to customers as part of our customer agreement and therefore do not provide a means to prevent this valuable information from reaching them,” the firm responded.

In other words: “No.”

Source: The Red Tape Chronicles – MSNBC.com

Capital One’s email was an offer to transfer balances to their card at a teaser rate of zero percent for 12 months. And the email claims that it’s transactional:

“This e-mail was sent to (you) and contains information directly related to your account with us,” it says.

And, if that wasn’t clear enough, their spokesperson said:

“Customers can opt out of marketing e-mails … but cannot opt out of account management communications, such as statement notifications, rewards information,” and similar notices, said Capital One spokeswoman Pam Girardo. “This is stated in the privacy notice sent to all customers annually.”

This is bad karma. You see, Capital One wants to send email that will be received and seen (and then hopefully acted upon). But, by going this route, they are going to generate complaints. And what do complaints generate? Filters and blocks.

What would be interesting to me would be to find out if Capital One segregates its mailings of account notifications and other purely transactional email to dedicated IP addresses and has its marketing mailings go out over other IPs.

Since they appear to feel that these mailings are transactional instead of marketing, then we should find that they are sending these balance transfer offers out over their transactional IPs and not their marketing IPs. That SHOULD translate into increased blocks and bounces for things like account statements and privacy policy notices.

Why? Because Capital One is too bull-headed to let people opt-out of certain classes of email. Or, to put it more succinctly: They refuse to follow industry best-practices.