Tears are not a desired response to your emails
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 29, 2008
This story over at The Consumerist illustrates perfectly why keeping to the letter of anti-spam law is often not good enough.It's an extreme example, but not honoring an unsubscribe request immediately (US law gives you ten days to do so) meant one company kept sending emails to a pet owner about her dog. Except the dog had just died.
Nothing illegal going on...but oh my goodness me!
Before anyone blames the problem on a bad coincidence, consider that the writer expected the unsubscribe request to work immediately (because most do). When people continue to get emails they thought they unsubscribed from, how do they react? Here's a clue:
A free email marketing t-shirt to the first person who can tell me three other potential problems with the company's email program, based on the above report (use the comments).
Also, read the story's comments to see the mixed views out there on what is and isn't legitimate marketing email. It's an education.
The key takeaway (as always) is that there is no right definition, but you do need to do what you can to stay away from the dark side of the email spectrum.
Tags: email marketing, spam, anti-spam
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2 Comments:
Mark, I would say this is a case of bad timing and bad email marketing practices. Neither of which are all too uncommon. Since you asked for it, here are the issues I spotted with their email marketing program from this fellows report:
1. They are constantly changing their From, bad idea, this should ALWAYS BE THE SAME. I see this all too often, people want to be cute, or have a promo going out so they want to differentiate, it seems like a good idea, but it just muddies the water and dilutes your brand.
Use 1 and only 1 from name, and please, use your company as the name unless your name is the brand.
2.They pre-checked the email subscription box. *sigh* Again, about 95% of retailers do this. So much for 'signing up' for a newsletter, more like 'conned into'.
3.They weren't actually removed from the list. There are a lot of reasons why she might not have shown up to the CSR as unsubbed. They very well may have been unsubbed, but it hadn't filtered through all the systems yet. This just reinforces the need for good data integrations and a well thought out data plan.
4.Those emails are sent far too frequent. Almost the most ardent pet fan will want to receive 3 emails within one week about pet medicine. Again, a trap a lot of green marketers fall into - your offering is so interesting, right? of course! everyone wants to hear about it all the time! no, really. Make a marketing calendar, pick a cadence that makes sense, stick to it.
So here is a case where a perfect storm of smaller cases turned into some bad PR. Hopefully they'll learn from this, and maybe some other marketers will see this and rethink some points of their email marketing as well.
We can only hope, right Mark?
By 
Adam Covati, on
30 May, 2008
Yep, inconsistent from line, overzealous frequency and the pre-checked sign-up were the three I was looking for. You win! And excellently put I might add!
I'll drop you an email about the t-shirt (that was a serious offer!)
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
30 May, 2008
