Not opting-out is not opting-in is not good for appends and not good for email
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on February 08, 2008
An article published Tuesday at MarketingProfs.com outlined an email append process used by a publisher which sent my eyebrows instantly a-furrowing.Email appending has become a formal business process with its own specialist vendors, but it seems somehow to have become disassociated from normal email marketing practices.
In today's online climate, nobody is keen to recommend opt-out email marketing. Where you add people to a list without getting their permission, but give them an opportunity to unsubscribe before you continue to email them.
But that seems to be a relatively common approach in email appending. Something that surprises the experts.
Opt-out is dangerous. Risky. Why?
Because when people don't opt out, it is not the same as opting-in. There is no active granting of permission to send them emails. And permission is the foundation on which email marketing success is based. No permission...much lower chance of success.
People may not opt-out because, for example...
- They never saw your first email
- They saw it and deleted it without reading it properly
- They couldn't be bothered
- They saw it and didn't opt-out because they've been told that you should never unsubscribe from spam
- They thought they'd give you a chance to prove your value
Ignoring the likely poor responsiveness of these folk to future emails, you can find yourself running into delivery problems because they eventually get annoyed by your mailings and report you as spam.
Have fun trying to prove the opt-in to your friendly local blacklist administrator. You can't. You never got one.
As such, taking a name and physical address from your prospect database, getting someone to match it with an email address and then emailing that address on an opt-out basis seems like a task that needs very careful management to make it work. (Update: If you want more arguments against opt-out appends, Morgan Stewart has several in-depth ones.)
Not that email append has to fail. Some experts like it. Good articles on the issues and the best way to do appends are:
A Checklist for a Successful Email Append from Pivotal Veracity
Successfully Navigate E-Mail Append by Derek Harding
Email appends done right by Morgan Stewart
There are parallels between the opt-out email append problem and the USA's alibi anti-spam legislation: Can-Spam. It makes the opt-out approach legal. Thus luring the misinformed marketer into assuming it's perfectly fine to use opt-out.
I will never tire of repeating the point that compliance with anti-spam legislation is not a criteria applied by email users, ISPs, webmail services, etc. when deciding if you're spamming. Just because it's legal doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Others have also written on this critical point, most recently Laura at Word to the Wise and our favorite baron of blacklists, Al Iverson, who has today's golden quote:
illegitimate) mail is CAN-SPAM compliant. Citing this
as a reason that an ISP should accept your emails is a
lot like bragging that your email has a subject line.
So all together now, just because they didn't opt-out doesn't mean they opted-in.
Tags: email marketing, email appends, opt-in, opt-out, permission marketing, can-spam
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2 Comments:
If someone requests a white paper via a short download form on a website, what freedom does that company have, under CAN-SPAM, to do follow-up marketing to this person via follow-up emails or phone calls? -- CTJim
By 
, on
19 February, 2008
I can only speak for emails. Legally under Can-Spam you can send that person marketing emails, provided you adhere to a few requirements. You'll find the details here.
But successful email marketing isn't just based on what's legal, but also on what makes marketing sense.
In the B2B world, it's unlikely that the recipient would find a follow-up email asking for feedback or seeing if they need more info on the white paper topic or asking if they'd like to get additional material from you through a newsletter etc. as anything negative. Adding the address automatically to a mailing list could get you into trouble. Some would see it as spamming. I would. Other people are more/less sensitive than me.
The uncertainty is removed if you make clear to people what happens if they submit their email address. If they don't want follow-up emails, they won't submit their address and you have no problem. It's never good practice to add people unknowingly to a bulk list.
You might find this article helpful.
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
19 February, 2008
