Question for Circuit City’s marketing department: Just how far are your heads up your… well, you know.
If a recent e-mail list-building effort from the electronics merchant is any indication, the answer is very far—as in getting no light or oxygen.
An e-mail arrived on March 4 into a Yahoo account set up in a three year old’s name inviting the recipient to join Circuit City’s e-mail program.
“Want to be the first to hear about the best products and latest news?” the e-mail asked. “If so, we'd love for you to join the other customers who are already receiving our e-mail updates!”
The pitch then offered a chance to opt out. That’s right, they decided that no response meant the recipient wanted to join.
Sure enough, on March 8 a welcome e-mail arrived. “We'll keep you informed of our best in-store and online promotions every week, along with our latest products and services,” the e-mail said.
The e-mail then asked what the recipient would like to do next, and offered two big buttons: “Shop at Circuit City, or “Take me to the preference center.”
There should have been a third button that said: “Slam a large metropolitan-area telephone book into the back of the head of the marketer who signed off on this scheme.”
What can these people possibly have been thinking? This e-mail address has not been used to communicate with any business or individual in months, possibly as long as a year. It has never been used to make a purchase, and has certainly never been used to communicate with Circuit City.
So here is why Circuit City’s effort will backfire, possibly disastrously. E-mail inbox providers reportedly use consumer complaints as the No. 1 gauge in determining whether or not to block incoming e-mail as spam. Get too many complaints: Get your mail blocked.
These same inbox providers also are reportedly increasingly taking note of the domain names appearing in spam, and blocking all mail that contains those addresses. This means if Circuit City’s list-building effort generated enough complaints to get its e-mail spam-blocked, the company may be finding its customer service messages getting blocked by those ISPs, as well.
Moreover, some ISPs use abandoned e-mail addresses as spam traps. Hit those, and you’ve got trouble.
As a result, Circuit City’s file-building effort presents a multi-level threat to all of its outbound e-mail. And for what: a bunch of non-responsive addresses of people who are as likely as anything else to hit the “this is spam” button and get its mail shunted off to people’s spam folders or blocked altogether.
Just because an e-mailer’s blasts are Can-Spam compliant doesn’t mean the inbox provider must accept the messages. And in fact, they often don’t.
E-mail marketing is not about list size. It’s about list quality. If Circuit City’s marketers have not already been rudely slapped into understanding this concept, they will be soon enough.
