cold leads
Lo! A different guy just popped up in my Linkedin feed to say that cold leads are cool, because they’re not illegal. (I’ve heard it before.) And for a bonus, he wants to argue about whether or not cold lead emails truly are “spam” — he says no. That’s fine, everybody’s free to have their own take, but if you’re loading my email address into an automation tool to send me an email, and I didn’t give affirmative consent to indicate my desire to receive that email, it’s spam. The law literally says that you have to label your mail as an unsolicited advertisement if you don’t have that consent. It’s not new, it’s not groundbreaking, it’s just the basic tenet of permission marketing via email. But, fine. “That’s my opinion,” even though it’s what the law says. And it’s not “just” my opinion. I think it’s observably unwanted and
I get it. Everybody needs to make money. If you’re in fundraising, advocacy, hyperlocal news, content newsletters, animal rescue, or almost anything, you’re in it to make money. Maybe not to get rich, but to get things done takes money and if you want to help your organization succeed, that means finding sponsors for potential advertising, sponsorship and other revenue opportunities. I’m not here to stop you from fundraising. But I have to warn you – cold leads are risky and damaging to deliverability. Send too much of that unsolicited “cold lead” mail and you’re brightly identifying yourself as a spammer, in particular to Gmail. One of the primary problems that potential clients approach me with is how to get themselves back to the inbox, after damaging their sending reputation by sending too much cold lead mail. Individually mailing 12 people directly whom you’ve looked up on a business leads
A few weeks ago, a particular consulting discussion with a potential client ended up not working out — cold leads and purchased lists, which is not really something a deliverability consultant can help with, without a complete 180-degree turn around in practices. Not everybody’s willing to do that.”You can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink,” as the old saying goes. I can only help when my advice is desired and the other person is interested in accepting that advice. And I can’t force it; my advice goes only where it is welcome and wanted.So, life goes on and we move on to the next one. Oh, well. I understand where people are coming from, and that they sometimes face challenges that I don’t face. I hope they’ll eventually come around and want to work within a best practices framework, but for me to try to
A friend recently shared a link to a spammer’s blog post bragging about how what they’re doing isn’t illegal. Weird flex, but OK. Going on your blog and defend your business model that way? “We’re not actually breaking the law! We promise! Cold lead emails are totally legal!” You do what you gotta do, I guess. But remember, farts are not illegal either, and they’re just about as broadly unloved as cold lead email campaigns.So, yeah, duh. Spam is not illegal. I’ve been pointing that out for years – here’s me mentioning back in 2010 that CAN-SPAM does not actually prohibit spam. It’s legal, flat out. But, as an argument to defend bad practices, “this is legal” is a red herring. What you should be asking is: how does CAN-SPAM regulate spam and what does it say about mail filtering and blocking? As I wrote about just a couple of