Arguing about permission doesn't change facts

A scuffle broke out in the blogging world following a post by Kevin Stirtz describing how you might send email to folk who haven't opted-in to your newsletter.

Delivery and email professionals have criticized him severely:

Laura at Word to the Wise
Al at Spam Resource
MickC at Intellectual Intercourse

Kevin has since clarified his post a little to eliminate the suggestion that one might follow his approach at a bulk level. Laura gets it right with her interpretation:

"With very small lists you can get away with personal relationships substituting for permission"

But any other situation, and you're camped firmly in spam land. Some recipients will report your email as spam. You will end up on blacklists, your email will go undelivered, your reputation (as a sender of email and as a business or brand) will suffer.

The posts and comments raise some critical issues anybody sending email needs to understand, especially newcomers. Lets' clarify:

The myth of relevancy

Nearly every unsolicited email I have ever encountered is justified by the sender on the grounds that it's useful, relevant and welcomed by the recipient. This claim is usually accompanied by testimonials from people who were grateful to get the email.

There's only one small flaw in that theory. It's bollocks.

Such senders (especially when vendors) always overestimate the importance and relevance of their emails. And always make assumptions about people's interests that simply do not hold for everyone.

Thinking anything else is self-delusion. You may think you know what's good for the recipient, but you can never be sure. And you will get it wrong at least some of the time. And when you do get it wrong, they will see you as a spammer if they never expected the email.

You are then left to hope that whatever personal relationship you may have had (and let's hope you at least had that) will earn you forgiveness, rather than a spam report.

See also "But surely my emails are relevant? (Erm...no)"

The myth of spam's harmlessness

Another argument in "favor" of unsolicited email says that it's no different to junk mail. This is alarmingly inaccurate.

The point about junk mail (and telemarketing for that matter) is that the sender pays the people who run the distribution infrastructure (postal service, telephone company) for the right to make unsolicited calls or send unsolicited direct mail.

Email senders, however, do not pay the distributors. Spam is a huge resource burden on ISPs and webmail services, whose costs inevitably get passed on to the customers. Who are therefore "paying" to get unsolicited email.

That's one of the reasons why email spam is a far bigger issue than junk mail. There are others, but that will do for now.

The myth of personal opinion

Everyone...and I really mean everyone...has a different opinion on what constitutes spam. Which means your own personal opinion is largely irrelevant. For two reasons.

First, as soon as you move away from a whiter than white permission-based approach to email marketing, you run the risk of sending email to someone who will call it spam. The further away you move from the ideal, the greater the risk. See Marketing email or spam? for more on this concept.

Second, those guarding the email infrastructure have their own clear views on what constitutes spam. And increasingly they define it as any email their customers do not want. Sending bulk unsolicited email, however well-meaning, will produce spam complaints, and ISPs etc. will act on those complaints. And your business will suffer.

It's really time we put the permission argument to bed. As Derek Harding argued so eloquently in a recent column...

"Our trade groups must make it clear that opt-out is spam and spam is bad for e-mail, bad for our customers, and bad for us. They must state without equivocation or prevarication that consent is a requirement."

More on permission | Tags: email marketing, spam, permission, unsolicited bulk email, ube, uce

Permalink | September 14, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | biweekly email | via Twitter

0 Comments:

Comments closed for this post