Reassessing your list and opt-in practices
By Susie Castellanos Hansley, iContact Deliverability Specialist
If you are like most people who send marketing email, you are likely proud of your list and want to see it grow. You may be even a bit protective about it and feel that every single one of those people on your list wants to hear from you and would be disappointed if they didn’t get your emails.
However, there are probably some email addresses on your list that should not be there. Some will have aged out and eventually bounce. Some are no longer used by their owners, causing your messages to land in a mailbox that is never used and resulting in lack of opens. Finally, some should never have been added in the first place because the person never really wanted to be added, or is no longer interested in what he or she signed up for.
For these reasons, good email marketers cannot rest on their laurels and assume their list and list acquisition practices are just fine. If contacts are not being obtained via good opt-in processes, or if they have not been emailed in a while and you attempt to send to them, you are endangering your own sender reputation. Poorly opted-in lists get high spam complaints, while lists that are not emailed regularly will get both spam complaints and high bounce rates. When that happens, over time your sender reputation will go down – causing the ISPs to eye your email messages askance and put them straight in the spam box.
Below are some things you may want to review regarding your list practices and hygiene.
Refresh my memory: What IS a good opt-in process?
A good opt-in process has the following characteristics:
- It’s verifiable. This means that one can go to the website or view the paper form or lead form used to collect the contact.
- It has a valid permission statement. This means that it sets clear expectations about email sending frequency and content, and it does it right at the precise point of sign-up.
Canada’s anti-spam legislation offers a good explanation of what constitutes permission, along with an example of a valid and verifiable sign-up form:
Another good way to collect contacts is to provide an easy opt-in process on other forms, such as on registration forms, “contact us” pages, and checkout forms. To ensure it is a fully permission-based opt-in process, add an unchecked checkbox to the form in question and invite people to check it if they want to be added to the list:
Poor opt-in processes to avoid
If you collect contacts using the following methods, it’s a good chance your sender reputation will be diminished. These kinds of opt-in processes lead to higher spam complaints and lower open rates:
- Business cards. How often do you remember who you gave your business card to? That’s right. They won’t remember you either if you try to send them a bulk email marketing message and will mark you as spam.
- Verbal permission. Some email marketers have their sales representatives talk to customers to get verbal permission from them to be emailed. However, unless one can verify every conversation to ensure that clear expectations were set to each individual person, there is no way to ensure that these people will remember or understand what they gave permission for.
- Forms with a hidden permission statement. Some email marketers bury their permission statements in a Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions. The reality is that most people do not bother to read policies. While having your email sending expectations listed in such hidden policies may protect you legally, it does not ensure that people fully understand what they are signing up for. If you insist on hiding your permission statement, you will have added people to your list that may not really want to be there. They’ll let you know their displeasure by marking your messages as spam.
- Forms with pre-checked checkboxes. Most people don’t notice those boxes and don’t realize they’ve been added to a list. Make your checkboxes unchecked by default so people can choose to opt in. iContact explicitly prohibits the use of pre-checked checkbox forms for collecting contacts, as this is not a true opt-in process.
Methods for collecting contacts that should NEVER be used
The following lead generation methods are prohibited by most reputable ESP (email sending providers), including iContact:
- Purchased lists: Do not buy or rent leads to send to, no matter how “fresh” and “permission-based” you are told they are. They are a waste of your money and their high number of bounces and spam complaints will burn your sender reputation if you send to them.
- Harvested lists: Do not go looking through people’s websites to find their business or personal email addresses because you think they want to hear from you. It’s not polite, it’s against the law, and the high number of spam complaints you’ll get will destroy your sender reputation.
- Borrowed or free lists: Some senders get lists from organizations that provide them willingly, for example, a Chamber of Commerce, a member-only organization, or a government office or school that provides lists to potential vendors. Some may also get lists from their friends or colleagues. If you send to such lists, the recipients will not know or care that the original collector of the email addresses was willing to share the list. It will still be considered unsolicited and marked as spam.
- Your email address book: Just because someone has emailed you before does not mean he or she wants to get put on your email marketing list.
- Social media friends from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.: Again, “friending” someone is not the same as “add me to your email list for your newest business venture.” You will get spam complaints, a lower sender reputation, and likely lose friends in the process if you do this.
Other types of contacts to avoid: Beware the “found list”
Sometimes people “find” a list and decide they want to send to it. Found lists include things like a newly discovered set of contacts in a company’s internal database, a list of contacts from that sweepstakes that was done in 2011, or a new list acquired through a company merger.
People tend to get excited by a “found” list, thinking, “This will get me more sales!” However, think twice before spending your good money sending to them if any of these things are true:
- You found a list of contacts and have no idea how they were collected or how old they are.
- You found a list of contacts and know that they have not been emailed in over a year.
- You found a list of contacts that you know were not collected via a verifiable or valid opt-in process.
In all of these cases, it is a bad idea to send to such a list. Why? Because it will bring you a bad return on investment. The amount of revenue you make from getting a few sales from that list will be far less than the money spent sending to them and the future loss of revenue due to the resulting poor sender reputation.
Conclusion
As the Email Sender and Provider Coalition notes, “Legitimate companies greatly cherish their brands and customer relationships. They continually strive to apply email best practices so as to protect their investments in both assets.” Your list, like your brand, is a precious asset. If you grow it carefully and treat your contacts with respect by following the best practices for collecting, sending, and list maintenance, it will serve you well. Avoid throwing good money after bad by ensuring you are only sending to those who really want to receive your emails.
