Over on his blog, John Levine talks up Co-Registration rights and wrongs. He proposes an interesting concept – if there’s a single point of opt-in, there should be a single point of opt-out. If one entity manages and handles the sharing of your opt-in data to third parties, as is often the case in co-registration situations, then it should be just as easy to tell that original party, “I’m done. I don’t want any more mail from any one of your partners – anyone you gave my address to. Go make it happen.” I like that, it’s not a bad idea.
What’s even better is to not utilize what I call indirect or loose co-registration. When you sign up on a site, and the site informs you they’re going to give your email address to trusted third-parties, that’s not even really co-registration. That’s selling lists. And buying those lists doesn’t work – it drives spam complaints and blocking. It’s exactly the kind of thing that results in me and my team spending countless hours helping a client repair their broken sending reputation, helping the climb out of the spam folder and back to the inbox.
Direct co-registration is far less problematic. That’s a scenario wherein a site explicitly asks a registrant if they want mail from company X, Y or Z, and then, if the registrant only agrees to mail from company X, only company X is given the registrant’s email address. Sounds like opt-in to me.
I do have to wonder though, does co-registration ever work? Is it ever a solid way to build an email list? I know, from the deliverability side of things, that there are a lot of pitfalls. A lot of ways to do it wrong, and if you do it wrong, you end up with a deliverability problem. On the marketing side, I recall Morgan Stewart, our director of research, pointing out that a couple of years ago that during multiple tests, co-reg simply doesn’t work from a marketing ROI perspective.
What’s changed since then? If anything, recipients are touchier about spam. They are more likely to report you as a spammer, and they’re able to do so more easily than they were a couple years ago. Co-reg strikes me as even riskier, and less likely to succeed, than it was a couple years ago. What do you think?
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