My post on May 27th, talking about the
permission failure inherent in exchanging business cards, and how that is not really an opt-in process, has inivited some well considered (and not so well considered) feedback via comments.
"It's freakin' elecctrons (sic) and that's what the delte (sic) button is for," spouts one random Joe. Freakin' wrong, if you ask me. But we'll touch on that more in a moment.
Commenter Lori Feldman put some more thought (and spell check) into her response.
"I have to disagree," she says. "Putting yourself 'out there' in eyeball to eyeball social networking where both parties hand over business cards is implied permission."Lori, thanks much for your comments. I do agree with you that exchanging business cards does imply permission for one-to-one communication. If I give you my card, it's not unreasonable to assume that you may personally email me. We're not talking about one to one communication, though. We're talking about adding somebody to a list. Permission isn't based on the recipient being "out there." Instead, a big part of permission is actually based on doing the right thing to ensure that your recipients don't complain in significant numbers to cause deliverability issues.
If your marketing strategy relies on the recipient having to take the "right action" (in your opinion), your marketing efforts are going to backfire someday. You, like so many others, talk about how you send people a message and they can unsubscribe, if they want to. I can't stress enough what a failure that is. What if your recipients report your mail as spam? You have no control over that, and what you're doing is making an assumption, and crossing your fingers, that they'll choose to unsubscribe, instead of reporting your mail.
It's a very common mistake-making an assumption and substituting that for permission, and telling recipients they can unsubscribe if they don't like it. The big ISPs are perfectly happy to relegate this mail to the bulk folder or block it outright. Why? Because assumptions lead to higher spam complaints and higher spam complaints lead to deliverability issues.
Keep in mind that I didn't just make this up; every day, I see somebody get blocked over this kind of miscalculation. It's a practical concern for successful email delivery. What to get the mail delivered? Don't make assumptions. Sure, not everybody has it blow up in their face every time. The cops don't always catch every criminal in the offline world, either.
"Just hit delete!" is what our inarticulate friend Joe wants us to do. Joe's clearly upset that people can do things without taking his wishes into consideration. It's something that happens millions of times a day, every time somebody hits the "this is spam" button at Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail or any of the other ISPs that support this functionality.
Joe can be angry about it if he wants, but anger doesn't get email delivered. Making sure you don't give recipients something to complain about is what gets mail delivered.
What's a better way to do it? You've received a business card, and you want to turn that into a newsletter subscriber. Akira Morita has a great suggestion:
"[Forward] a published newsletter (with a personal message inviting the receiver to subscribe) would be an okay way to get around not having a explicit permission. Of course, you want to make sure it's relevant to the receiver first, but this way, they don't have to actually opt out from anything if they don't want any more emails from you."I like it! Why? No assumptions made. Want to keep receiving emails? Feel free to opt-in. The net result is a list that is more responsive, because it's comprised only of recipients who want your mail, not a mix of those people and people whom you've made assumptions about.
If Permission is King, then Engagement is the Emperor, my esteemed coworker Karen Balle explained to me this morning. And she's right.
Over on Email Insider, George Bilbrey of ReturnPath provides some very good advice on how senders are ultimately in control of their own ability to enjoy deliverability success. He writes, "From time to time we run into marketers who think that they have deliverability covered because they have signed up with an Email Service Provider (ESP). You've probably even seen some ESPs that are promoting their very high delivery rates. This is confusing and misleading, because the ESP fully controls only one of the five major drivers of deliverability failures."
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