I found out this small new blog called Email Marketing City. No comments or trackbacks yet. No “subscriber count” gadget, probably because there are no subscribers yet. I feel like I’m Christopher Colombus discovering new virgin lands for his queen.
Anyway, since I’m a big hater of Email Marketing (especially when I’m on the receiving side), I went straight to “What exactly is Email Marketing” and found the following:
Of course, there are some disadvantages associated with email marketing.
- SPAM – If your company constantly sends emails over and over again, some people might consider it spam and either personally boycott your company or file a civil complaint. Obviously, this is not good for any company.
[Victor bangs his head on his desk. Repeatedly. Screaming bloody murder all the time.]
SPAM has nothing to do with sending email repeatedly. Sure, if you send more mails, it only makes the situation worse. But should you smuggle even a single e-mail into my inbox without my consent, then it’s SPAM, and will be treated as such—with a flamethrower (ah, 2001 goodness).
Now, don’t get the wrong idea : Email Marketing City is quite well-written and provides useful information, especially if you need to do email marketing. In fact, even if you never intend to do email marketing, you should still go over there and read some articles to see what it’s like on the other side of the fence.
Still, they managed through sheer bad luck to poke me in the way nobody should ever poke me. So, back to my frothing-at-the-mouth angry rant…
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I treat my e-mail as a communication tool. If you want to communicate with me, you can send me an e-mail. No, really, I mean it: just click on victor@nicollet.net and send me that e-mail you’ve been burning to write about how much you hate SPAM ever since it killed your family and your dog.
But communicating with me is not the same as communicating to me. If you send me something, it’s either a response to something I asked for, or something I can respond to.
Rule 1: never send me something with a no-reply@something address, unless I explicitly asked for it.
Seriously, you’re sending me e-mail that I didn’t ask for, but you won’t allow me to send you e-mail in return? An e-mail that spells out “We don’t care about you, just listen to us and buy our stuff” is precisely what you shouldn’t be sending.
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Sometimes, you will ask me for my e-mail. That’s fine: I usually give it out to people when I need to hear from them. But you should make it extremely clear what you will use that e-mail for. A good example would be the Motley Fool, a financial information website or something like that. They offered to send me a report if I gave them my e-mail, which I did. Since June 25, 2009, I have received 174 different pieces of e-mail from the Motley Fool, and 173 of these were not the report I asked for.
Rule 2: if I give you my e-mail address because I want you to send me X, don’t use it to send me Y.
And, of course, should you give me the choice of receiving more mail from you…
Rule 3: if you have a “don’t send me informational mailings” checkbox and I uncheck it, respect my decision.
Again, an e-mail that spells out “We know you don’t want to receive this, but we sent it anyway because we only care about the money” is not a good message. And I don’t care if you’re Amazon-dot-freaking-com: if this happens even once, my business will be taken elsewhere.
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The biggest mistake you can make with my address is to hand it out to someone else. There is no worse violation of my trust.
The second biggest mistake you can make is to send me something if you have obtained my address from someone else.
As a simple test, I signed up for a contest on planet 49, a business that revolves around collecting personal information about the contestants and selling their contact information. At no point the sequence did I actually accept to receive promotional information (which, by law, is opt-in on all French web sites). Then I watched as 1194 pieces of promotional e-mail ended up in my inbox from companies like UPS, Honda, easyJet, HSBC and Orange Businnes [sic]. All these companies are now blacklisted: I will only purchase stuff from them as a last resort.
Rule 4: should you ever get your hands on my e-mail, ask yourself whether the mail you send me will be received with feelings of anger and betrayal.
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I’ve had the opportunity (for lack of a better word) to work for businesses that willingly ignored the first three rules above. I once asked why they’d break rule one—don’t they want to hear back from their customers?
I still remember the senior consultant’s answer on that one…
If we use a real address, it will be spammed by people angry about the mail we send them.
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
Hey Victor,
Pretty interesting post you have here. Thanks for the link to my article, even though you disagree with the definition of SPAM.
I agree with you, one unauthorized message would constitute a spam message, but as you know, when you subscribe to a newsletter you are going to get more than just the initial message. It all depends on what a recipient considers “SPAM” to be – For some, one message a week may be way too much for a person. For others, 2-3 emails a week might be acceptable.
In email marketing, its all about finding that balance point (and it will vary by niche) about keeping your subscribers happy and not spamming them with useless information and affiliate ads.
The blog was created around June 18th, which means that it is a little over a month and 3 days old. It is growing, slowly but surely
Great content you have here nevertheless and I look forward to reading more.
Hi Brad. Thank you for your comment.
If I were to subscribe to a newsletter, I would never consider that newsletter as SPAM even if they did send it to me ten times a day. If I asked for it, then I deserve to receive it. I would consider it rude if there was no way to unsubscribe, though.
I guess the SPAM that worries me is when I receive a message that I never agreed to receive in the first place, and the SPAM that worries you is when you are flooded with content after you opt in. I agree with both definitions.
You do cover the “opt in” part later in your post, but I’m sure Planet49 and The Motley Fool genuinely believe that if I give them my email to receive X, it allows them to send me Y as well in a fair and legal “opt in” fashion. I guess what matters here is Permission (Seth Godin is a great read about this) more than the actual ticking of a checkbox.
What do you say about a really custom hand made email intended to you personally, but is a sales pitch?
For example, suppose you have a website to sell phones, and Joe have a product that is really super to help convert visitors to phone buyers at very low cost.
Will it be all right if Joe write you an email telling you about his product that you may increase your sales and lower your costs? You did not ask to be informed by Joe, in fact you never heard of him before, but you may be happy to know about his product none the less.
And if you agree it is ok to inform you with a custom email described above, would it be all right if Joe obtains a list of websites that sell phones, and send all of them a similar email?
Hi Iftah. Long time no see.
The thing with custom hand-made emails is that you can’t send many of them, so your business will probably involve selecting only a few potential customers and communicating with them. It’s suicidal to contact a mere 50-100 people and then let your landing page on your web site do all the customer management for you: you actually want these people to write you back and ask questions so you can convince them your product is useful. Such a personal e-mail would probably respect all four rules above, so I wouldn’t mind it. In fact, I would be honored if someone took the time to learn about me, make some informed hypotheses about my needs (even if they are ultimately wrong) and hunt down my contact info.
This is not on the same level as “automatically track down contact info for thousands of anonymous or near-anonymous individuals and send mass mailings without caring about who they actually are”.
I often reply by mail to first-time commenters on my blog, for instance. It’s a personal hand-written mail and I do my best to find out who they are as a person, what they write about on THEIR blog, or what kind of job they have. I would never set up an automatic “thank you” email sent whenever a comment is posted. Two-way caring communication is much more powerful than one-way intrusive communication, and it’s practically insulting to think that automatic one-size-fits-all e-mails are of any use.