Three Evil Words

Pssst. Wanna know how to spot an e-mail list pitch that’s probably been sent by a vendor selling garbage files?

Hint: It’ll contain three evil words.

What are those words? Why, “for perpetual use,” that’s what.

If readers take one lesson away from this newsletter in 2009, let it be that no reputable firm sells e-mail names for perpetual use.

A reputable list owner or manager will sell access to subscribers on a one-time basis and mail the list on the marketer’s behalf, but they won’t sell the names.

Why? Because building a responsive, permission-based e-mail list takes one hell of a lot of time and effort and no one who legitimately goes through the process is going to let someone else hammer the crap out of their file.

I feel a little awkward writing this piece because the concept is so basic, but a bunch of readers have forwarded me e-mails from vendors—or it could be the same operation for all I know—offering tens of millions of names “for perpetual use.”

I’ve received a couple of the pitches myself.

And like Nigerian 419 scams, people must be responding to these pitches, otherwise they’d stop.

Moreover, I am consistently amazed at stories from consultants and e-mail service providers recounting some of the wacky things their clients want to do with their e-mail marketing programs—such as buying names from what should easily be identifiable as a shady data vendor.

Said one vendor after recounting some e-mail-marketing wackiness a client wanted to try: “They’re a really solid company, a big brand that you’d recognize if I named them. They just don’t know anything about e-mail.”

Apparently a decade plus since e-mail began emerging as the quirky marketing channel it has evolved to be, there are still a bunch of marketers out there unschooled on the basics.

At the risk of boring some readers, here they are:

E-mail is a permission-based marketing channel. There are many good reasons for this.

For one thing, it’s so cheap to send, it lacks the economic governors that force marketers to restrain themselves on other channels. For another, unlike with the postal service, in e-mail the sender doesn’t bear the full cost of transmission. Inbox providers such as Gmail and Yahoo expend vast resources processing and sorting incoming e-mail in what are generally surprisingly effective efforts at protecting their inbox holders from spam.

Sure, under the federal Can-Spam Act, sending unsolicited commercial e-mail is legal, but spam has been deemed as utterly unacceptable in the marketplace. The law doesn’t determine whose e-mail makes it into recipients’ inboxes, consumers and their inbox providers do.

The No. 1 metric major inbox providers use to determine whether incoming mail is wanted or not is spam complaints. According to conventional wisdom, a mailer who gets a spam complaint rate of 0.5% or more at a particular ISP risks getting all their messages blocked from reaching recipients at that ISP.

Not surprisingly, marketers who mail without permission tend to get spam complaints. And when marketers experience e-mail deliverability troubles, the first place a consultant will look is their permission practices.

And the marketer who gets blocked for spamming has no recourse other than to stop doing whatever is was that got them labeled as a spammer in the first place—like, for example, finding and purging all the names in the house file that were purchased “for perpetual use.”