* The world of e-mail marketing services
There’s a curious intersection between Web applications and e-mail which is the world of e-mail marketing services. There are literally hundreds of companies in this game and they divide into two main groups, managed and the self-service platforms.
The managed services usually come with a whole set of marketing services such as list sourcing and brokering as well as editorial and response management. Think of this as marketing consultancy, I don’t believe that there’s a single bulk mailing service company of this type that now doesn’t provide clients with a Web interface for campaign management and tracking.
On the other hand, self service operations tend towards a more-or-less do-it-yourself approach providing you with Web sign-up forms; list upload and management facilities; and all of the nuts and bolts you need to build and run an e-mail campaign with almost all of your interaction with their services being Web-based.
The problem with the whole bulk commercial e-mail industry is that the lists that most of their clients use in their campaigns are dirty.
Everyone makes a big fuss about opt-in campaigns and all of the big e-mail marketing services boast “abuse” accounts (but never a telephone number) to report spam-like activities involving the campaigns they mediate. Unfortunately, the reality is that no matter how many times you report the misuse of your address it is guaranteed that you’ll get more unsolicited crap via yet another e-mail marketing company you’ve never heard of.
This is the story of my life. Everyday I get two or three “newsletters” that tell me I am “subscribed.” The problem is that I never have subscribed and many of the addresses they send to are those that I use for reader feedback from my Network World Backspin and Gearhead columns!
There are also a few addresses I accept e-mail on that have not been used for a long time and which act as “honeypots.” Use of these addresses is definitive proof that the sender is spamming yet the first response when any of the list owners are challenged is that the address was an opt-in. Push a little harder and you’ll find that they can’t prove the provenance of your abused address.
The final response of all of these companies, whether it is the service company or their client, is “Gee, sorry,” we’ll take you off our list. In the case of the service company we can pretty much guess they say, “take this address off your list” and that’s that – they aren’t really going to can a client just to watch that client run off to a competitor.
Just today I got a “newsletter” from the Fleet Ledger, a pretty lame publication from Smartdrive Systems, a company involved in the business of fleet management.
The message was sent to the reader feedback address for my Gearhead column and the service company providing the bulk mailing was Campaigner from GOT Corporation. The message ended with “You are subscribed as xxxxxxxxx. To unsubscribe please click here.”
What I found particularly irritating was the statement in their message that “You received this e-mail because you are subscribed” which of course I hadn’t done voluntarily. The text continued “To learn more about SmartDrive’s use of personal information, including the use of Web beacons in HTML-based e-mail, please read our Privacy Policy.”
Their Privacy Policy is some lame piece of boilerplate text on an ugly Web page that screams “we don’t give a *** what we look like,” says nothing about Web beacons, and pretty much doesn’t commit to anything I would trust.
This is typical of the direct marketing crud we all get, and the big problem for me is that I’m wasting time following unsubscribe procedures two or three times every day that are different for each company!
Some senders provide a Web link to unsubscribe and everyone has a completely different back end. Some immediately unsubscribe you while others require you to uncheck boxes and even enter your e-mail address (which is about the most annoying unsubscribe you can have).
Other companies don’t use Web services for unsubscribes but rather require you to reply to the message. Again, there’s no consistency. Some require “unsubscribe” or something similar in the subject line, others in the message body, while others require that a message ID or tracking code be returned in the message. It is a Tower of Babel.
It would be great to have some serious laws to regulate the industry but let’s be honest, that ain’t going to happen because there’s too much money involved. I have a suggestion: We need a simple set of laws to regulate the e-mail marketing industry.
First, all bulk e-mailers (say, sending anything more than 1,000 messages per week) be licensed, which would include both marketing services and their clients. All messages would have to include the license number of the sender or if a marketing company is involved, of both the marketing company and their client.
Second, all unsubscribe services must work the same way. I suggest that all bulk mailers should provide a one-click unsubscribe via a Web URL which must be in the body of the message. They could include any other methods they like, but that one must always be provided. Perhaps we could mandate that it must have a consistent form such as a tail that would read, for companies not using a marketing service, something like “/unsubscribe/
I’d like to think that there would be few objections from marketers as the requirements aren’t onerous and everyone would benefit. All the junk mail that gets sent to corporate users could be automatically processed by their e-mail gateways and the sender’s lists automatically purged. This would prevent wasted effort by both parties – the recipient organization that doesn’t want the messages and the sender who doesn’t want to waste resources.
Of course the recipients and their organizations couldn’t just kill off all bulk mail because then their real subscriptions would get canned along with the stuff they don’t want. But a consistent standard method would mean less end-user aggravation, better corporate control, and less waste of marketer’s resources.
What do you think? Send your comments to webapps@gibbs.com. If you subscribe that address to a list be warned: I will hunt you down and torture you.
