permission
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
Did you know? Spamhaus has a free eBook to help email marketers know how to do the right thing.With an introduction by Annalivia Ford, one-time postmaster for AOL (remember them?), this deliverability guide from Spamhaus will walk senders through the concepts of deliverability and email reputation, how to not look like a spammer, and other important things you need to know to stay on the right side of email marketing best practices.And they don’t even make you opt-in to get access to it. Click here to download.And don’t forget to join Spamhaus’ Matthew Stith and me on Tuesday, March 21st at 9am central time for a live webinar where we’ll talk blocklists, Spamhaus, domain reputation and more. You can register here.
The other day, I talked about the spam seemingly sent by a local aldermanic campaign here in Chicago. When I talked about this spam on Facebook, one of the folks pushing back attempted to lead me down an existential rabbit hole based on the theory that we just can’t know whether or not a given email message is spam. That it is literally impossible to know with absolute certainty whether or not a single email message is unsolicited. Which is yet another one of those (possibly) correct but (definitely) not very useful kind of responses. Let’s break it down.First, let’s get this out of the way. Yes, it’s absolutely true that there is no “this message is unsolicited” flag or email header in an email message, allowing anyone, at a glance, to immediately know, whether or not a given email message is spam or not.The recipient has a pretty good
Previously I’ve talked about the affirmative consent standard found in the US federal anti-spam law (CAN-SPAM). I’ve found it very useful test when trying to understand if a process is appropriately opt-in our not. Wondering if GDPR has something similar? It does.For various reasons, the UK and the EU have slightly differing versions of GDPR, but the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office provides us with a pretty good guide for email marketing permission standards, and I think it’s a good starting point to learn about opt-in requirements EU-wide.The ICO explains that “Consent requests need to be prominent, concise, easy to understand and separate from any other information such as general terms and conditions.”Opt-in is key — see “What methods can we use to obtain consent?” for more details. No pre-checked box, not hidden in terms and conditions, and make it easy to understand.The handy website GDPR.eu, put together by Proton AG
Anti-spammers and deliverability folks might think of this as a Permission Pass email. And indeed, Spamhaus has a whole guide describing how they think you should do it properly. But in addition to confirming and cleaning up certain types of problematic email lists, an email message process similar to this can be helpful to boost engagement, and boost deliverability and marketing success at the same time.Deliverability people call them re-engagement emails, while marketers call them winback campaigns. By either term, they’re extremely valuable as part of a “lifecycle management process” where you you might take one or more tries to “re-engage” (request a response / look for a sign of life) from non-responding recipients, and then, if they don’t respond, either suppress them (or apply other strategy) to get them out of the way of most mailings. The goal at the end of the day is to reduce the amount…