For the last several months, I have been noticing an uptick in the numbers of people who are noticing that their mail is not getting though, and what is getting through is going into the bulk folder.  In the past couple of months we have also seen Spamhaus taking a greater notice and showing a greater willingness to list ESPs on its famous blocking list.

There are three things driving this:

1. Complaints. Believe it or not, people do complain about spam, they just don’t always do it to you. Rather they tell their providers that they don’t like what they’re seeing. Those complaints are factored into IP reputation metrics by some providers and a “fingerprint” of the message may be factored into content filtering.
2. Engagement. We’ve been saying for years that ISPs are taking notice of what their clients are doing with your mail. We are now seeing some pretty firm metrics that indicate that not getting rid of people who don’t care about your mail has a detrimental effect on your ability to deliver mail to the inbox. Now, I’m not saying that ISPs are tracking clicks, but recent experience indicates that continuing to mail people who are refusing to even view your messages has an impact over the medium to long terms.
3. Unclean lists. Who engages the very least with an email marketing campaign? People who never asked to be mailed in the first place. Using purchased, rented, or appended lists is a sure way to drive low engagement statistics and high complaint rates, for the perfect storm of points 1 and 2 to drive decreased delivery.  Right behind that is going to be assuming that permission lasts forever. Sometimes people don’t want mail anymore, so take some time to ask people who haven’t responded in a year or more if they still want to get your mail.

So, what does this mean? Simply that the space has to grow up. When you were a kid, you could run to mama and get her to make everything better. When you grew up some, mama started making you solve some of those problems yourself.  The same is true here: You can’t run to your ESP or an ISP and expect them to “make everything all better.”  They both expect you to take some responsibility for what you are sending and to whom you are sending it.

So, the next time that you have an issue, take some time first to examine what you are doing to minimize complaints and the use of unclean data, and what you are doing to drive engagement.  Take some responsibility for what you are doing. Your ROI, your ESP, your recipients, and their ISPs will all thank you for it.

I also think that this ties into recent discussions regarding whether “best practices” are actually the best things for folks to do on a regular consistent basis.  Consider this quote from Andrew’s article:

In addition, the general rule of thumb for X amount of time has long been 6 months.  Not sure who made that rule up or all of us (me included) who have used it as gospel over the last several years, but 6 months cannot be further from an industry standard.  There are so many factors that need to be looked at: seasonality, product mix, previous engagement metrics, time to inactivity, trending etc….that 6 months is no longer the standard.

I know who came up with that: it was someone who specialized in reputation repair.  The purpose of this “general rule of thumb” has nothing to do with reactivating subscribers and everything to do with quickly fixing a problem that was leading to loss of revenue.

This is the difference between triage and planning. I teach CPR and First Aid (something I’m qualified to do all the way up to Wilderness First Responder). In my more advanced classes, we study and apply the START algorithm to sorting victims in a multiple casualty event.  When you are engaged in triage using START, there are four possible outcomes for someone that you come across who is bleeding and breathing: Minor, Delayed, Immediate Care, and Deceased. All that triage is, then, is sorting your injured into one of those buckets.  You wait on helping the Minor and the Delayed cases.  You do what you can for the Immediate.  And you completely write-off the Deceased.

The first three buckets are the easy ones, it’s “Deceased” that’s hard to call.  That’s why, in most circumstances, we want doctors to do that.  And in our training slides, we look at one scenario when you have to label a 3 year old as deceased, even though he’s probably someone who could be saved. (And, for your peace of mind, we also point out that if resources become available, you should go back and try to save that one.)  But, everyone, no matter their age or socio-economic status, has to go into one of those buckets.

When you are dealing with a triage situation, everyone is hurt.  Everyone needs care.  And the care that everyone gets is not going to be the same level of care arrived at using the same decision trees that you would find if you were sitting in your doctor’s examination room receiving your annual physical.  When you are with your doctor in an exam room, you have time and access to long-term information that allows you to make more precise decisions.  When you’re laying out in the field, unconscious and bleeding, that luxury doesn’t exist.  The people providing first aid have to rely upon rules of thumb and treatment protocols and algorithms.

So, let’s apply that to email.  When you are experiencing good delivery it’s as though you are sitting in your doctor’s examination room — you can take the time to look at various strategies for subscriber reactivation.  You can consider factors like “is an inactive someone who hasn’t opened, or someone who hasn’t purchased.”

On the other hand, when you are not experiencing good delivery, when your sender reputation has tanked and you need to turn to someone like me (or my co-workers), then neither of us has the time to engage in an extended discussion about what an inactive subscriber might be.  This is a triage situation and you’re going to experience some loss as a result of allowing things to deteriorate to this point.  The people that you are working with to fix things are likely using rules of thumb and treatment protocols and algorithms — like “an inactive subscriber is someone who hasn’t opened or clicked in the last six months.”

When you hear about “best practices,” those are generally going to be the rules of thumb, the treatment protocols, and the algorithms that get used in triaging delivery problems.  They’re good for fixing problems, and represent a minimum level care that will generally “do no further harm.”  Just as the treatment decisions made out in a field are not likely to be the same (or even the most appropriate) decisions that could be made with time to reflect and make appropriate plans, following “best practices” are probably not always going to be the best decisions for you or your business.  But, when decisions need to be made now, you need to have something to turn to.

So, what is the takeaway from this?  It’s better to do things because you planned to do them than because you have to in order to stop the bleeding.  You have better (and more granular) options, along with the time to come up with a plan to accomplish what you’re hoping to do.

Apparently, Spamhaus agreed with those folks, as SBL115700 appeared on August 15.  (Currently, it says that this is the “2nd listing in less than 30 days for spam from this IP”.)

There are, of course a lot of things to say about this course of action, but one that stands out above the others.  And I found the evidence this morning in my own mail reader.

The image that you see with this post (which links to a full size version) is taken from Thunderbird this morning, and it it shows you where and how this “opt-in” email arrived in my Gmail account.  That’s right, it showed up in my spam folder, where it has sat for the last three days, unopened and unread.

Unlike a lot of people, I do actually go through my spam folder and see what gets caught.  I just happened to see this in the midst of all of the counterfeit bag/(fake) Cialis/work at home scam/(bad) porn spam.  And, the penalty for not seeing what was in my spam folder would have been to receive more email.  And I could only hope at this point that Gmail would have tagged it all as spam and dealt with it so that I wouldn’t have had to.

The thing is, if I had complained about one of those emails, Penton would have told me that I had opted in to receive the mail because I hadn’t opted out. But, you see, I didn’t opt-in, I just never saw an opportunity to stop the mail preemptively.  And I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one that this would have happened to.

That’s why a well-run opt-in campaign will mandate that the user take action to receive the mail.  That action can take place in a number of places ranging from “at the website where they are signing up” to “click here to receive these valuable offers that we’re just now getting ready to send you.”

Email is certainly one of those places where you cannot assume that silence is consent.

Image by Royal Australian Navy via Flickr

This morning, I got a question about some, but not all, of a mailing going into the bulk folder at a large ISP.  “What does it mean when they do that? What should we do?”

Most folks seem to think that sending mail to the bulk folder is an “all or nothing” proposition.  They know that there is a problem if all of the mail goes to the bulk folder.  And, of course, there is no problem and everyone is happy if all of the mail goes through.  But, that is not always the case.  Sometimes only some mail goes to the bulk folder.

Now there are a variety of reasons why this might happen.  I could be (but probably isn’t) a mistake on the part of the filter.  It could be a dynamic thing that happens due to complaints about that particular mailing and your next one will be fine.

Or, it could be a warning shot telling you that someone’s reputation system is taking another look at what you’re doing.  That is to say that marketers are not the only ones testing out there.  Receivers have systems that are constantly testing things to make certain that their filtering decisions are the right ones.  And if your mail stream seems to be on the cusp of the Inbox/Bulk folder divide, guess whose mail is most likely to be the subject of one of those tests?

So, what can you do? I suggest restricting mail to the most highly engaged recipients for two or three weeks while you take time to have a good, hard look at your list and all of the feedback you get from various sources.  Are people getting what they expect when they expect to get it?  Do you have some (especially older) list segments that are dead on the vine and need to be trimmed?  Consider doing a re-engagement campaign to get rid of the dead weight.

I often look at partial bulk foldering as that warning shot.  Feel free to comment with the other warning shots that you look for.

Earlier today I asked a couple of questions on Twitter:

1. “How does one go about transferring permission?”
2. “Why do marketers buy ‘opt-in’lists?”

The first question did not get many answers.  The consensus of those who took the time to respond was that permission might be transferred in an assets purchase. Beyond that, it would appear that people who follow my Twitter feed don’t think that permission is transferable.

The second question got a bit more discussion.  Answers ranged from the serious (“Because purchased lists fit the model that pre-Internet marketing used? I.e., opt-out “cold call” direct marketing?”) to the inane (“competitive drive to waste more money and accrue more blacklistings than the competition..”).

As I was considering the answers given, a new question formed itself in my mind: When discussing permission in messaging what is the difference between an appended list and a purchased list?

I suppose the most easily noticed difference between them is randomness. What is often referenced when discussing a “purchased list” is a list of names and/or addresses that have no prior connection a company.  In theory, when an appended list is created the names on the list have some form of connection and then an append company is hired to try to get addresses matched to those names.  But, is this not a form of buying addresses?

I cannot, however, disregard the fact at my fingertips: Appended lists drive complaints at almost the same levels as purchased lists.  Appended lists gather the same type of complaints about lack of prior permission that purchased lists gather.

In fact, from an operational standpoint, I cannot tell much difference between them.  So, dear reader, do you consider appended lists to be a form of purchased lists?  Why or why not?

Delivery professionals have been telling clients for years that a bigger list is not always a better list.  We have been telling people that mailing people for sake of mailing people is not a winning strategy.  And, we have been advocating mailing to engaged subscribers while letting the dead wood fall away.

And for years we have suffered (not so) silently as clients have refused this advice as being counter-intuitive and wrong.  They say, “That’s just crazy talk!”

Well, even though there are lots of other case studies that say the same thing, Marketing Sherpa is here to back us up once again.  Case Study #CS31751 about the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra is free to read until November 19, 2010.  And it also forms what I believe is our first entry in this site’s Email Hall of Fame.

There are some important bits here that are worthy of consideration:

1. The Symphony lost 95.9% of their list as a result of re-engagement, but they worked on list growth as well.

While the team initially cut 95.9% of its list size, it has grown the list by more than 500% from that low point. The list is now approximately 24.8% of its size from when the team started–but it is far more responsive, Newman says.

2. By the end of the study period, their revenues had increased.

Online sales have more than doubled to 35% of all the company’s purchases since the re-engagement started. 40% of all subscribers have purchased tickets from the Symphony.

3. They do not assume permission to mail for any reason.

The team regularly holds contests at festivals and outdoor concerts it participates in. Contestants are asked to fill out an entry slip with their name, contact information and email address.

Winners are often announced via email. After the contest, the team will then send an engagement email to contestants, similar to the one described above, which encourages them to subscribe to one of the newsletters.

That last point really impressed me.  So many marketers assume that just because someone gives up an email address that they then have permission to send them any marketing materials that they like.  But not the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.  They use the address to fulfill the needs of the contest, and then they ask the contestants to subscribe to their newsletters.

We need more people to market like these folks do.

I heard some muttering a couple of weeks ago over a Mediapost article suggesting that the email marketing arena is full of incompetent, potentially criminal idiots.  The hand-wringing and whining has centered around the choice of tone for that article.  If Mediapost was looking for some publicity out of this, they certainly got it.

In the comments section of that article, we see some complaining about painting everyone with the same brush.  And, hey, no one likes to be lumped in with another group.

The thing that we have to be aware of is not only that we are guilty of the same thing, but that so is everyone else.  Don’t believe me?  Well, then, read on.

First of all, think about yourself.  When was the last time that you referred to “the receivers” or “the receiving community”?  That’s this broad brush that we don’t like to be painted with.  Not all receivers are the same.  Not all administrators at all ISPs or other receivers would make the same decisions given the same set data.

Second, understand that the brush is wide for a reason.  The people who make filtering decisions spend all day long looking at data, only that data.  When you consider the data that they are looking at, there are two or three common characteristics to large percentages of it:

1. It is marketing.
2. It is phishing.
3. It is illegal (whether that be virus-laden, or mail that doesn’t comply with CAN-SPAM).

And there one characteristic it all shares: It is generating complaints.

And I can hear many of you saying, “But, that doesn’t describe MY mail!”  And that may just be true.  But, there is another question that I hear from people at filter providers, and ISPs:

“What are you doing to convince everyone else to do things right?  When are you standing up to everyone who is wanting to do things wrong?”

And by “everyone” they actually mean “everyone.” They mean friends, colleagues, and competitors alike.

Not long ago, I got a message from someone saying that they liked how I was willing to call someone out who was offering bad advice.  And I’m flattered that someone feels I’m influential enough to compliment me like that, but I have to wonder….

Why do we spend so much time talking our companies and ourselves up, and giving ourselves fun group names like “snob” and “gurus” than we do calling out the bad ideas and talking about how they’re bad or calling up the great ideas and talking about how they’re good — even if our competitor is doing it?

Do you want people to stop painting all email marketers with the same brush?  Then draw a steep, deep, dark line showing what you think best acceptable practices are.  Then hold everyone to it, friend and competitor alike.

The people over at AlchemyWorx put out an article today with this post’s title: “Getting real about inactive subscribers.” About all that I can say about it is that it is a “feel good” article.  The entire point of the post seems to be to help email marketers feel good about inertia.  Why should they feel good about inertia?  Because “you don’t know” (a phrase used twice in the piece, but hinted at on at least 6 occasions).  You don’t know if people want to be removed, you don’t know if your emails are generating sales in other channels, you don’t know what your recipients really want.

The answer here, of course, is simple: If you don’t know, find out. Now, the execution of that strategy might be a touch more difficult, but the answer itself is simplicity.

If you are unwilling to spend the time and money and expend the effort to find out why people are not fully engaged by your email, then you need to purge people who are not demonstrating their engagement.  Letting inertia carry things through until the subscriber makes a move is usually a bad idea, because that move may not be the one favorable to your business.

So, let’s look at some of the arguments here.

For one thing, we are talking about people who have opted in to receive your communications, and who have access to the simplest possible functionality – a single, clearly labelled click – should they wish to opt out again. Simply deleting these people from your base is assuming that you know better than they do what they want.

The fact is that “a single, clearly labelled (sic) click” is the exception rather than the rule.  Responsys’s 2009 Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study noted that a plurality (39%) of unsubscribe processes took 3 clicks to accomplish.

Not only that, but we often engage in proactive, protective measures. When someone reports a single mailing to a feedback loop partner, we remove them from the list entirely.  But that person didn’t take advantage of the ability to opt-out, and you could make the argument that the marketer doesn’t know if it is just that mailing that the recipient found to be spam-like, or if the recipient was just labeling all of the mail in their inbox as spam to clean it out (and yes, that does happen).  It’s still the right thing to do.

So we’d disagree with the tendency to refer to long-term inactives as “emotionally unsubscribed”. The term puts an unnecessarily negative spin on email marketing, implying that the inactivity is somehow the fault of the sender. Many of us are perfectly happy to keep on receiving marketing emails without opening them (or not often). We may be busy, or we may open them much later from our archive, or we may simply be waiting for the right email to come along. . . .

In fact the more you think about it, the more long-term inactivity appears as perfectly normal, even the default mode for many subscribers. After all, how often do you actively interact with a marketing communication – of any kind, in any channel – from a car dealer, insurance company, real estate agent, consumer electronics retailer or hotel chain? Why then should email marketing be any different?

Email is a different medium than any other.  Long-term inactivity may be normal, but means that you need adjust what you are doing to what the recipient wants. There is a reason why consultants like me don’t start and stop with the advice to purge inactive subscribers.  List segmentation and listening to and setting recipient expectations are also important parts of the mix.

Again, this is a point where you have to wonder why inertia is a good thing.  Getting great results in email comes as a result of putting time and effort into what you are sending, figuring out who you are sending it to, and why you are sending it.  If you are not willing to put the time, effort, and money into figuring out how to do things the right way, why are you in this business?

After all, some 35% to 55% of your list will not have interacted with your emails for between 6 months and a year. These are people who do want to receive your emails, but don’t need your content or offer – yet. But they’re happy for you to keep putting stuff in front of them, and if you remove them you’ll never know if you missed another sale.

Assumptions are inertia’s greatest allies.  Here we see two of them at work:

1. All of your inactives want to receive your messages.  The fact of the matter is that there will be some inactives who want to continue receiving your mail and are just waiting for the right offer to come along.  But, there will also be a good percentage of those inactives who are inactive because they don’t care.  They don’t care about you or your offers.  No offer that you send will ever be acted upon.
2. Not mailing your inactives means lost sales. The assumption here is that inactives are buying using other channels.  Instead of clicking through to your website, they are visiting your bricks-and-mortar storefront or calling the operators that you have standing by.  The key to understanding these sales is that you need to figure out a way to quantify those patterns.

You cannot afford to stake your reputation on assumptions, especially assumptions that tell you that inertia and the status quo are the right way to go.  If you are going to leave some or all of your inactives in your active file, you need to be basing that upon data, not inertia.

Most of the time, when someone engages my services they are already suffering from reputation problems and they need help to get that fixed.  Removing inactive subscribers is one part of that process. Holding tightly to the status quo because I just don’t know about that one sale I might be losing is not.

Why? Because blind inertia is not doing email marketing correctly.

I unsubscribed from a mailing list recently. When I did, I was confronted with the following message:

We’re sorry to see you go.

You should be aware that it could take up to ten business days to completely remove your address from our lists.

That’s a pretty standard disclaimer that complies with the time limits put in place by the CAN-SPAM Act. So, what’s the big deal?

The “big deal” wasn’t anything that I thought about until last Friday. It was then that I saw a tweet. Hoon Park said something that really resonated with me:

I try to unsubscribe, but if you continue to send me email, I will mark you as spam. I’m not sorry if it messes up your deliverability.

Now, thinking back to that disclaimer I saw, I noticed that there is a potential problem there.

When my dad unsubscribes from something, he expects that to be immediate. I suspect that your dad, your mother-in-law, and your weird Aunt Millie would all agree with that, even if they have never agreed on anything else, ever before, maybe in their entire lives. So, when he gets that next email it’s spam to him, and he’s not afraid to tell his provider so.

But, the law says that you have 10 days to remove his address.

Perhaps it would be helpful if we stopped thinking of that window as an opportunity to make a little bit of revenue before the fun comes to an end. Maybe it would help if we started looking at that ten day window as an opportunity to stop damaging our reputation.

Why? Because that recipient thinks that they have tried to opt-out. And they really aren’t sorry if your reputation is damaged because you mailed them some more during that 10 day window.

Many of the things that I write about come about because I’ve been talking with colleagues or just looking at what is coming in my mail reader. On an average day I receive around 1,000 emails. Much of it is spam that never gets looked at, but many of the messages are from mailing lists, but others are from clients, prospects, friends, and then there are those from my wife’s business venture which sends me receipts for products sold and requests for assistance. It takes me a lot of time to get through my email and I see lots of examples of what not to do.

If you wonder why your open and click rates are not what you hope them to be, perhaps there is a good lesson for you: It is really easy to be angry. In fact, it is much easier to be angry than it is to be impressed. I get a lot of email, and with few exceptions, I spend only a few seconds on each one. Most email gets a pass (I don’t care enough to do more than glance, but I don’t unsubscribe). Of the email that gets a response, I tend to be angry about what see because best practices aren’t being followed, or I notice that a former client is now selling my test addresses to other vendors.

It takes something truly wonderful to grab my attention and make me take a closer look. And, unfortunately email like that does not come around very often. It is why I always try to take a moment to read when someone points out a campaign that they think is really doing it right. And it is also why the majority of my posts are about people doing it wrong.

So, if you want to help me be a more positive person and I’m on your mailing list already (please, I get enough email as it is without people adding me to their lists without my permission), do me a favor and really work on doing things right.