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Do consumers hate email append?

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by Al Iverson
It sure looks like they do. Morgan Stewart breaks it down. It looks to me, as it does to Morgan, that consumers are not pleased when a company they've done business with, but not provided an email address to, suddenly start emailing you. When they put you on a mailing list without consent. When a company falsely assumes that a business relationship equates to permission.

Seriously, can somebody explain to me, why would you ever engage in a marketing practice that is going to upset a good 50% of the people who end up on your list?

It's nice to see the data on consumer expectations. It backs up the deliverability side of the equation, the elephant in the room that people have been dancing around for years: Email append grows your lists, grows them into big, dirty beasts that get you blocked and bulked. The biggest, the worst, the most significant deliverability and marketing strategy issues I've dealt with over the past years, they are all due to email append. A company, some well meaning big brand, tells me their list is all opt-in, everybody asked for this mail, and they're just plain stumped as to why the big ISPs don't want to allow it to the inbox. Many discussions and much head scratching later, it comes out that they had done some big email append and magically grew their list by a couple million addresses. And gee, if you back that append data out, suddenly their deliverability improves. (Most of the time it has been Just That Simple.)

As Morgan says
, "The belief that marketers can send email to their customers based on a ‘prior existing relationship’—the premise for email appends—is dead. Customers don’t want the practice to continue."

Comments for Do consumers hate email append?

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Tim Swigor:
Is it the additional appended emails that cause the problem or the company's inability to strategically segment and message accordingly to their new larger email universe? Email Append vendors, as a standard practice; send out a permission pass message to provide the recipient the opportunity to opt-out from future email communications from the company. The permission pass message typically acknowledges the company’s current or prior relationship with the recipient and as stated before, gives the recipient the opportunity to opt-out from all future email communications. The problem here is not the appended emails but the improper non-strategic use of them.
Monday, November 9, 2009 by Tim Roe:
This is oh so true, and however you want to dress it up, email append is not a good idea, and may even be a bit grey legally (in the UK). The idea that you can email someone out of the blue and say “You’re our customer, we’re going to email you (unless you stop us)” doesn’t sit well with the idea of recipient focused, permission based, communications. To successfully email someone in the first place, you should have gained their permission and set expectations, and this cannot be done with email append. Nice one Al

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