For reasons known only to the folks at the Direct Marketing Association, the group has included its cockamamie e-mail preference service, or eMPS, in its newly revamped direct mail opt-out service DMAchoice.
The move has caused confusion in the marketplace with Dylan Boyd blogging about it here and Al Iverson blogging about it here.
As Iverson points out, the DMA’s eMPS isn’t new. It was launched in the late 90s under then president Robert Wientzen as part of his “one-bite-of-the-apple” argument in support of unsolicited commercial e-mail. It was an idiotic idea then. It’s an idiotic idea now.
eMPS was an e-mail idea concocted by direct-mail minds. It can’t work.
As far as I know, few if any marketers use it. Those who do are most assuredly engaged in activities that get their mail blocked by Internet service providers. Think about it: Marketers who use the DMA’s eMPS are by definition labeling themselves spammers.
Heck, even hard-core spammers know enough to lie and say their messages are all “double opt-in.”
Put another way, marketers who send permission-based e-mail have no need for the eMPS. They got permission explicitly from the recipients, remember? They don’t need to clean compiled e-mail lists of people who said they don’t want to receive unsolicited marketing messages, because they don’t send to compiled, or harvested in this case, e-mail lists.
The only way the eMPS could have worked is if e-mail had evolved like direct mail where lists are passed around as a matter of course. It didn’t. The costs that force direct marketers to keep their postal files relatively clean don’t exist with e-mail. As a result, the only way e-mail can remain viable commercially is on a permission basis.
Therefore, the DMA’s eMPS service is worse than pointless. It’s damaging to the industry. Telling people they can limit the amount of commercial e-mail they receive by signing up for it raises false expectations and damages direct marketers’ already not-so-great reputations with consumers.
Revamping the DMA’s postal mail preference service to give people more choices seems like a reasonable move. Including a pointless relic from the late 90s in it is an embarrassment.
