What\u2019s on your email rap sheet? In my last MarTech column, \u201cStop! Or go directly to email jail<\/a>,\u201d I listed 10 crimes that could send digital marketers to the email Big House \u2014 from misdemeanors like sending transactional emails without even a line of business-building promotional copy to felonies like buying a list or skipping authentication.<\/p>\n No discussion of email lawbreaking is complete without throwing a few jailhouse confessions into the mix to illustrate my point that all of us have committed some marketing infraction, either because we didn\u2019t know any better, we were desperate or someone (like a boss) made us do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those excuses might not fly with Judge Blocklist or Their Honor, the ISP. But I hope you take some comfort in knowing anyone could end up on Email\u2019s Most Wanted list.<\/p>\n This is where many emailers turn into marketing miscreants. I\u2019ve seen it happen often over my 26 years in email and working with companies of one or two people to international enterprises. Every company is different and everyone I meet needs some help.\u00a0<\/p>\n I often end up as the company\u2019s email lawyer \u2014 an outsider with a fresh perspective and wider understanding of what\u2019s happened in the digital messaging universe. I\u2019m unencumbered by office politics and dedicated to helping them succeed on the right side of the law.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve witnessed my share of email misdeeds, some inadvertent, some deliberate and the work that goes into cleaning up those situations and bailing companies out of email jail. I\u2019ll share just a few stories below. I hope they inspire you to improve your processes and establish goals to fix whatever might be skirting the law \u2014 whether it\u2019s an actual statute like CAN-SPAM (in the U.S.), CASL (Canada) or the GDPR (in the EU) or a generally acknowledged best practice like permission.<\/p>\n While purchasing a list for email marketing is technically not against the law in the United States, it violates many email practices, such as permission and consent.<\/p>\n The confession<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n As an avid golfer, I was excited to work with a well-known golf equipment manufacturer. I soon learned the CEO had just paid a cool six figures for a list of millions of names and email addresses. And boy, were they excited about that!<\/p>\n In our first conversation, I heard huge predictions for what this massive list would mean for the business. They wanted me to help get their message out there and convert massive quantities of new customers.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t happen quite like that. Over the next two weeks, I met multiple times with company people and walked them through the hard metrics that showed how they had just lost all that money. Among those metrics was the upfront cost to validate all those millions of addresses on top of what the CEO spent to acquire them.<\/p>\n I also made it clear what they could expect for customer responses (not much), spam reports (a lot), sales (much less than they expected) and what it would do to their sending domains (major damage).<\/p>\n From that high six figures spent on the list, I said, you could expect to earn about $23,000. They disagreed. That was the end of my work with that company.<\/p>\n The lesson<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n I never heard whether they launched any campaigns using that unvalidated list, but it highlights one of the penalties of being in email jail.\u00a0 You\u2019re paying for something that will never give you a ghost of the return you expect.\u00a0<\/p>\n People buy and use email lists every day because it\u2019s easy to do. They\u2019re blind to the ramifications. But you know them now.<\/p>\n Dig deeper: <\/em><\/strong>4 best practices to build a clean and engaged email database<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n One of my earlier employers was for a multichannel international retailer. We had a decent setup \u2014 an eight-member email team in-house and an extended agency team. But we were in retail, so we were going a mile a minute all the time and even faster during the holidays. We couldn\u2019t help being tactic-driven email marketers. Our jobs were all about getting campaigns out the door.<\/p>\n CAN-SPAM had just become law in the U.S. My company met with the Federal Trade Commission, which administers the regulations of the CAN-SPAM legislation. Google\u2019s Gmail was not yet the powerhouse it is today. Deliverability was a thing back then, but most of us were not as cautious about protecting it as we are today.<\/p>\n The confession\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A colleague came into my office and shut the door. Panic-stricken, she confessed that she had just sent a major campaign to a custom list that included all our unsubscribed email addresses. Not just recent ones, all of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having just met with CAN-SPAM, my panic mode went off the charts. We had just broken the law \u2014 not just a nice-to-have best practice. The. Law.<\/p>\n How did this happen? We didn\u2019t follow a clear process to be sure we were sending to the right list. As it happened, the segmented list our data people pulled for her campaign included unsubs. We should have seen that the list was too large for the segments she had specified, but we missed that glaring detail in our haste to send.\u00a0<\/p>\n So who had to spend time in email jail for that? Luckily, nobody. We got the equivalent of being let go with a warning. Nobody said anything. Spam complaints didn\u2019t blow up. Nobody got fired. But that was 2004. If that happened today? I shudder to think.\u00a0<\/p>\n The lesson\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n No matter how big your email program is or how fast you have to move, you must slow down and set up processes to keep these incidents from happening again.\u00a0<\/p>\n I still get a little sweaty thinking about that, though.<\/p>\n A friend worked for a B2B publisher with a combined email house list of about 100,000 addresses (probably 20% active). He and his boss noticed that opens and clicks were steadily declining while hard-bouncing (permanently undeliverable) addresses grew quickly. This accelerated after the recession of 2008 when many people in his industry were laid off as teams were downsized or eliminated.<\/p>\n The usual practice, as you know, is to remove hard-bouncing addresses and sequester them so you don\u2019t email them and risk the wrath of the ISPs and blocklists. The company\u2019s email platform removed those addresses automatically and sent them to a do-not-send list. As a result, emails were re-sent only to soft-bouncing addresses three times before those were removed.\u00a0<\/p>\n The confession\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n So far, so good with the list hygiene process. But then the publisher got suspicious and wondered how many of those undeliverable email addresses were false positives or addresses incorrectly classified as undeliverable. Against the advice of just about everyone, he had the data team build a mailing list from the do-not-email file and send a newsletter to it.<\/p>\n The results? A couple of opens (maybe bots). A few clicks (again, maybe bots). No appreciable change in engagement. Enough \u201cundeliverable\u201d dings to get the sending IP added to at least one major blocklist and who knows how many ISP filters.<\/p>\n The lesson<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n If an email address comes back as undeliverable, believe it. The cost of checking on it just in case is too high.<\/p>\n Dig deeper: Modern email marketing: Data privacy, bulk email restrictions and more<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n In my work with another major national brand, somebody thought scraping the complex HTML template and sending one campaign as an all-text email would be a good idea. Why? Because he read about another brand doing that, and the click-through rate was off the charts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Well, sure, it was high because the email was different. It\u2019s a novelty. You get a boost from the attention because it\u2019s a change from the normal template. That\u2019s why it pops. You can create an effective campaign if you plan it carefully to take advantage of the one-off design.<\/p>\n The confession<\/strong><\/p>\n The first few campaigns did well enough. But then the executive committed his first felony. He used the results from an isolated incident to change the entire program. As you might expect, the novelty wore off. The numbers declined. The email team went back to its HTML templates.<\/p>\n This led to his second trip to email jail, causing the program to lose money because he acted on faulty information.<\/p>\n The lesson<\/strong><\/p>\n Always test and retest to validate your findings. Be sure what you\u2019re testing with your hypothesis is accurate. Watch out for radical changes in which novelty influences the outcomes rather than a data-proven strategy.<\/p>\n All this talk about email jail reminds us that email marketing has a set of rules, just as there are for any other marketing channel. You must play by them or face real consequences, such as being denied entry to the inbox.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the early days, we could claim ignorance because we were all learning and many of the rules we follow today weren\u2019t written back then. The penalties either didn\u2019t exist or were less drastic. But ignorance of the law is no longer an excuse.<\/p>\n The thought leadership addressing these issues amounts to the world\u2019s greatest email law library. It\u2019s as close to you as the archives of MarTech or a search through Google.<\/p>\n As we look at the email madness of Q4 (yes, I just went there), you\u2019re probably wondering how to stay out of email jail. Help is just a query away!<\/p>\n One thing I don\u2019t recommend is something that kept me out of email jail back in the day: sending doughnuts to the ISP guards.<\/p>\n In my early career, AOL was one of the big mailbox providers we had to appease continually. In those early days of deliverability, senders had to be whitelisted to reach those inboxes. I knew the AOL Postmaster and would send her gift certificates to keep us on the \u201cgood\u201d list.<\/p>\n Yes, it was bribery. And, no, don\u2019t do this with today\u2019s postmasters \u2014 unless you know their clothing sizes, favorite wine or kids\u2019s ages. Eh, maybe not even then. Following the email rules is still your best bet to stay out of email jail.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n<\/div>\n Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff<\/a> and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.<\/em><\/p>\nEveryone has something to fix<\/h2>\n
4 confessions from email jail<\/h2>\n
1. Buying a list<\/h3>\n
2. Emailing to unsubscribed addresses<\/h3>\n
3. Emailing hard-bouncing addresses<\/h3>\n
4. Changing everything based on one campaign<\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nWrapping up<\/h2>\n