Last week, I had another in a long string of conversations with an e-mail marketing manager whose boss is pissed because he won’t screw up their e-mail program by implementing one of the boss’s cockamamie ideas.
In this particular case, the boss scraped a bunch of e-mail addresses off the Internet of people who had attended conferences in his industry. He wanted our clearly long-suffering e-mail manager to add the addresses to the company house file.
Can you say: “marketing suicide?”
Lately, I regularly get messages from frustrated e-mail managers whose bosses are trying to prod them into doing something self-destructive. Apparently, when the economy took a dump, occupiers of corner offices across the land suddenly noticed their company’s little e-mail program—a program they had previously paid no attention to—was wildly profitable.
Their solution? Why mail more, of course. What other solution could there be? If two e-mails a week brings “X,” then four e-mails a week should bring “2X,” right?
All we have to do is be Can-Spam compliant, right?
Wrong and wrong.
In order to help e-mail managers explain to their bosses why such behavior is wrong, I’ve decided to write an open letter they can print and hand to them. I say print because we don’t want to take the chance the boss in question doesn’t know how to use links.
So here goes:
Dear Boss:
The person who just handed this article to you would like to say all of the things I’m about to, but is afraid you’ll fire them for it.
First, they are not some politically correct idiot who wants to hamstring your company’s ability to turn a profit. Just the opposite, in fact. Every time they say you shouldn’t do something to your e-mail program, they’re trying to protect it from being irreparably damaged.
The three top metrics e-mail inbox providers use when determining whether to block incoming mail are how many spam complaints the mailer gets, how many spam traps the mailing hits and how many non-existent addresses it tries to hit.
That scraped list you tried to get your e-mail manager to add to your file is chock full of addresses that will send all three of those spam metrics into the stratosphere. And so is that cheap list of e-mail addresses you just bought from a data vendor you’ve never heard of or seen at a trade show.
As a result, if you add those addresses to your file, you more than likely won’t be able to reach even people who want to hear from you because ISPs will begin blocking your mail.
Moreover, the ISPs won’t lift the block until you or someone speaking on your behalf can explain what happened and demonstrate that steps have been or will be taken to clean the problem up.
Essentially, your e-mail manager or your e-mail service provider’s ISP relations specialist is going to have to call their contact at the ISP red faced and explain that you forced the addition of those garbage names into the file, that now you understand why you shouldn’t have done it and that after you clean up your file, you won’t engage in such nonsense ever again.
The folks running ISPs’ abuse desks—they’re called abuse desks because your garbage is abusing their systems and their job is to get it stopped—don’t care that you’re Can-Spam compliant. All that means is you honor opt-outs, a baseline requirement.
And that idea you have about sending more mail? It’s not one of your more brilliant flashes.
More mail will draw more spam complaints and you know what that means.
Finally, the person who handed you this article would like you to know that while you’ve been ignoring your firm’s e-mail program, they’ve been elbow deep in research, reading newsletters, participating in discussion groups and attending panel discussions trying to get a handle on this quirky medium.
Now that suddenly you have realized your e-mail manager has overseen the development of a wildly profitable channel, they would like you to stop looking at them like they have monkeys flying out of their butt when they tell you an idea you have for the program is unwise.
They have specialized knowledge about a marketing channel that operates on rules different than any in direct marketing history and they have your company’s best interests at heart.
Finally, you know why everyone laughs at your jokes? Hint: It’s not because you’re funny.
