Sometimes, we get letters. Jared writes, “Its great to see your helping people get away with spamming. You should throw my email into your mass email spam lists. Get in line with the others.”
I find this type of email really frustrating. I don’t hear stuff like this all that often, thankfully. But when I do hear it, I wonder, what? Get away with spamming? You really think that’s what ExactTarget does? Help people spam? Yuck.
Jared also sent along a link to some old blog post that shows how long subject lines can be in different email clients. So, he might not be all that knowledgeable about email or have a clear picture as to what he’s mad about.
Regardless, that got me thinking. If somebody out there does think that about us, maybe I should take the time to answer the implied question. Do we spam? Allow spam? Help spammers? The answer is a loud and clear NO. NO, we are not spammers. NO, we don’t allow spam. NO, we don’t support spam.
ExactTarget is not a list broker. Don’t call us to buy a list. We don’t sell them. We don’t buy them, either, so spammers should feel free to stop trying to get me interested in their “guaranteed opt-in leads.”
We don’t allow clients to buy lists. This isn’t a lead generation system, and permission-based email doesn’t work with lead generation lists. It’s just not compatible.
ExactTarget is a tool. A really powerful and useful tool, one that allows our clients to mail their own customers. People who have signed up to receive email from them directly, not to mail random people that some company *thinks* might want to hear from them.
The six of us here on the core deliverability services team act as the spam police. We enforce our anti-spam policy, sending guidelines and thresholds, and the opt-in provisions of our contracts. We suspend, reform or terminate spammers regularly.
We look at what clients are doing constantly.
Over the past month or so, we’ve worked with over twenty-five clients, guiding them on how to shore up their opt-in practices; giving them a clear understanding that only opt-in is allowed. For a few of those, we told them we’re not going to be able reach out to an ISP for assistance until a problem is resolved. In some of those past instances, our requirement has been that the client must reconfirm their existing email list.
We end up terminating an average of one client a month, and this month was no different. Of course, we like our clients a lot, and ones that can be reformed, we’d much rather reform them than terminate them. A reformed client means no more spam, and a client we keep means they keep paying us. Everybody wins. But, they don’t always want to work with us, or don’t always agree with our policies. And in those cases, it’s in our best interest to move on. So we do.
That’s what me and my team here at ExactTarget have done to stop spam lately. What have you done to stop spam lately?
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