Stupid Marketer Watch: Columbia House Rents Crappy List

Just when I think the majority of old-school direct marketers finally for the most part understand that e-mail is not simply electronic direct mail, a prominent one pulls a boneheaded move proving me wrong.

The latest numbskull e-mail campaign comes from Columbia House for its DVD club. The continuity marketer sent an e-mail calling "former members" back to its DVD club to one of my addresses.

Not only am I not a former member, the e-mail went to a dummy account I set up in my son's name to sign up for messages from sources I think are suspect. Clearly, one of those suspect sources put the address up for rent.

[MySon'sName]@yahoo.com has never been used in a single e-commerce transaction. So not only did Columbia House send a dishonest reactivation offer to a non-permission-based list, it rented names from a sleazeball. Which sleazeball is anyone's guess.

As a result, a large percentage of the recipients of this campaign have most certainly hit the "report spam" button, helping Columbia House gain a reputation with the big Internet service providers as a spammer.

Question for Columbia House's marketing department: Have you guys read even a single trade article about e-mail marketing in the last few years? The stupidity of renting e-mail lists and sending messages to them with your own brand in the subject line—even to lists represented as permission based—has been so widely discussed you have to have purposely avoided reading anything currently being published on the subject.

So for everyone who is still not clear on why Columbia House's "reactivation" campaign was essentially a form of e-mail marketing suicide, let's go over this again: The No. 1 gauge ISPs use to determine whether or not to treat incoming e-mail as spam is the percentage of people who hit the "report spam" button. If more than a small fraction of a percent of recipients complain, presto, the e-mailer starts having delivery troubles.

Getting blocked these days generally isn't the result of some anti-spam blacklisting zealot with a bug up his ass about all forms of commercial e-mail. It's the result of the people on the receiving end of marketing garbage letting their inbox providers know that they want no more of it.

If Columbia House doesn't currently have e-mail delivery problems, it will, and the resulting inability to mail will be completely of its own doing.