Stupid Marketing Watch: Hurting Two Brands with One E-mail

Add to the list of big-name marketers doing unwise things with e-mail the venerable Smithsonian Magazine, and this time on behalf of a partner, Rosetta Stone.

Smithsonian Magazine began in October 2007 sending unsolicited e-mail to a dummy address I set up. For a while, this address received e-mail from Smithsonian Magazine about once per month. The messages stopped last October [I think I opted out, but can’t remember for sure.]

So yeah, we’re talking about a grand total of about 12 messages here—not exactly a capital crime.

Then last week a message arrived from Smithsonian Magazine with a Father’s Day theme on behalf of foreign language instruction firm Rosetta Stone.

“Smithsonian magazine occasionally sends out special partner offers to its valued readers,” said copy above the pitch. “You are receiving this email because you have opted in to receive our partner e-mails.”

Trouble was, I never knowingly opted into e-mail from Smithsonian Magazine, never mind “partner e-mails.” So in one e-mail, I was spammed by two companies.

So let’s consider a possible scenario where Smithsonian Magazine’s permission statement could be true.

When I set up the Yahoo e-mail account Smithsonian Magazine has been mailing, I opted it into a bunch of e-mail-address-acquisition efforts to see what would happen spam-wise and how difficult it would be to clean up the mess. As reported here before, the address got a lot of e-mail, but it wasn’t difficult to clean up.

However, the address still gets the occasional message from well-known brands even though it has never been involved in a commercial transaction.

So apparently, Smithsonian Magazine bought this address from a data vendor.

Now maybe one of the e-mail-acquisition sites I opted this address into had a privacy policy that said something along the lines of: “By signing up for our offers, you also are opting into offers from third parties who rent e-mail lists from companies who buy names from us.”

Yeah. Maybe.

But even if there is some hyper-technical argument that Smithsonian Magazine does have permission to mail an address whose owner never knowingly signed up for its e-mail and who has never made a single commercial transaction using it, the Rosetta Stone mailing was very unwise.

Why? This address has shown no activity for 20 months. For all the marketing group at the Smithsonian Magazine knows, the address has been abandoned and Yahoo has turned it onto a spam trap.

Spam traps are one of the top gauges ISPs use to determine whether or not an e-mailer is spamming. Hit enough of them and the ISP will decide the mailer isn’t exercising acceptable list hygiene and will block its e-mail from reaching even address holders who want to hear from the marketer.

Moreover, it’s been eight months since the Smithsonian Magazine last mailed this address. The Rosetta Stone campaign has to have drawn spam complaints out the wazoo.

Too many spam complaints are also a sure way to get blocked by ISPs.

If readers take one message away from this piece, it should be that the “report spam” button changed the game of e-mail marketing entirely.

For better or worse, as soon as that button came into play, the definition of spam went from “bulk, unsolicited, commercial e-mail” to “whatever recipients say it is.” And this is not a point that’s up for debate. It simply is the case.

By mailing an address for 20 months that has never shown any activity—and presumably other similarly inactive names—Smithsonian Magazine is engaging in behavior that is putting its entire e-mail program at risk. This latest mailing didn’t do Rosetta Stone’s brand any favors, either.