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2011: The Year Where Do Still Do Not Make Contact

I’ve been working with email for close to 14 years now.  Sometimes, those of us who have been in the industry for a while will see something that someone does and point to that as a reason why we will never work ourselves out of a job.

Well, now we are to the time of the year where people start making their rosy predictions and prognostications for the  coming year.  For instance, last year I created a white paper with tips for 2010.

I considered doing the same thing again this year, but then I realized something:  the tips have not changed.  Not at all.  In fact, if you want to get your mail delivered, you need to do the same things that I told you to do last year.  By and large, this advice has not substantively changed in four or five years.

If you send mail that people want, when they want to receive it, you are not going to have deliverability problems.  But, that message still has yet to sink through the heads of the vast majority of marketers.  And, it’s not the only bit of advice that people are not listening to.

Don’t believe me?  Consider a list of issues that I have either dealt with myself or seen others have to deal with in the past month:

  1. Appending.  Really?  We are at the end of 2010 and people still think that appending is a good idea?  I suppose it is possible to come up with a way to do appending in a fully transparent, permission-oriented manner, but have yet to actually come across it in the wild. Most appends are “opt-out” appends and are treated by those who use or advocate for them, as though they are infallible, despite seeing bounce rates of 50% or more.
  2. More than two years ago I wrote a post dealing with CAN-SPAM and the Business Relationship exception.1 Today, that post is one of the most frequently linked to posts on this site.  I’m glad that people appreciate my thoughts on the topic, but we are two years on now and it is still necessary to tell people that Transactional and Relationship messages must somehow relate back to the original transaction?
  3. Assuming permission. I suppose that this may be somewhat related to the previous point, but I am still shocked by the number of people who seem to think that I want to receive notices of sales of spockets because I bought some widgets from them late last year as Christmas presents.
  4. Denying the power of permission. Last month, I did two posts on the topic of permission, including one written by my father, in response to a MediaPost article which asserted that permission something that consumers actively want marketers to disregard.

We could go on, of course.  Al Iverson, for instance, did a wonderful post a couple of months ago on the Top 4 CAN-SPAM Myths,2 and we are now far enough out from the implementation of that law, as well as its latest Rule update, that this should not have been an issue.

So, 2010 was not the year that we made contact.  And I doubt that 2011 will be either.

Footnotes

  1. Mickey Chandler, Prior Business Relationships Are Irrelevant, Spamtacular (Oct. 7, 2008), https://www.spamtacular.com/2008/10/07/prior-business-relationships-are-irrelevant/ (last visited Dec 29, 2010). ↩︎
  2. Al Iverson, Top 4 CAN-SPAM Myths, Spam Resource (Oct. 28, 2010), https://www.spamresource.com/2010/10/top-4-can-spam-myths_28.html (last visited Dec 29, 2010). ↩︎
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Mickey

A recognized leader in the fight against online abuse, specializing in email anti-abuse, compliance, deliverability, privacy, and data protection. With over 20 years of experience tackling messaging abuse, I help organizations clean up their networks and maintain a safe, secure environment.