What do your permission practices look like?

How do addresses get added to your mail files?

These are important questions concerning your front-end practices that have an almost immediate impact on the delivery rates that your mail campaigns experience on the back-end. Why? Because the composition of your mail file has the greatest impact on your reputation rates.

Back in April, Laura at Word to the Wise posted “Reputation as measured by the ISPs“. It’s a great post and lays out very succinctly the kinds of things that get looked at when your sending reputation is determined.

One common refrain that I hear is one that goes something like this: “We were in contact with the recipient in some way in the past, so we have permission to mail them.” That contact will usually take a number of forms: contest entries, card drops at conventions, sales contacts, or prior emails exchanged between the recipient and a particular employee.

Now, as a general rule these are very poor ways to populate a mail file. Why? Because contact isn’t the same thing as permission. People who aren’t marketers tend to give out their email addresses for limited purposes. If they drop a business card in the fishbowl at the local Chinese buffet, they expect that they’ll be contacted if they win unless there’s a clear and conspicuous notice on the fishbowl saying that they’ll be contacted for some other purpose. If they give you their business card at dinner while you’re both attending the Lion’s Club pancake dinner then they expect one-to-one communication from you.

But, in neither instance does the recipient expect to be placed on the company’s general contact mail file. So, when they begin to receive mail, they promptly report it as spam. Why? Because the recipient feels that they never requested the mailing. And “This is Spam” clicks is one of the biggest things that ISPs look at when determining sending reputation for your IP. (And that is why I linked to Laura’s article on this earlier. If you haven’t read it yet, you really should do that. We’ll wait on you. I promise.)

Now, someone will say “But what else did they expect us to do with their contact information?” The answer to that, of course, is found in my previous statement: “People who aren’t marketers tend to give out their email addresses for limited purposes.”

The answer to this problem, then, is to immediately adjust their expectations. Tell them upfront what you intend to do with the contact information that you are collecting. Then, you’ve got real permission, and they are expecting you to add their contact information to their mail file.