Over the past week or so, I have received several marketing emails from very reputable major brands that are seriously missing the mark as far as Best Practice is concerned.  I have two gripes, the first being use of dubious email sources that the end user may or may not be aware of, the second being the unsubscribe options offered to the consumer by some third party email data companies.

In my inbox this week were campaigns from major UK brands in the Travel sector, Financial Services sector and Leisure sector.  On each occasion, the domain name of the sender was a website that simply does not exist.  To compound things further, the small print detailed, “We only practice true permission based emailing. To view our privacy policy please visit the website you originally opted into or contact us.”  Sounds OK in principle doesn’t it? Err…no.  The recipient has no way of knowing where their data has come from let alone being able to figure out which website they originally gave their permission on.  The email industry has really cleaned up it’s act in the past few years and there are more than enough reputable email marketing companies out there to ensure that your communications hit the mark.  I suspect that some of these campaigns may be coming through affiliates who are using cheap inventory to achieve required CPA deals.  There’s a great article on the DMA’s Email marketing blog which explores this further – www.dmaemailblog.org.uk. Every email marketer needs to ensure that they are aware of what inventory is being used to fulfil their campaigns, as ultimately the brand advertiser is responsible even if they are using 3rd party opted in data.  While these campaigns still make money for the advertiser, what is the cost of the potential damage to the brand image amongst consumers?

OK, moving onto 3rd party email lists specifically.  I have seen numerous campaigns of late that have come through reputable email marketing companies.  The issue I have is that they contain a link to unsubscribe from the advertiser, but not from the 3rd party list being used.  I understand completely why list owners would want to do this.  They have spent time and money creating their lists and are understandably keen to ensure that they keep the volumes up and minimise unsubscribes.  Therefore, if I unsubscribe from one advertiser, they can still sell my data to a different advertiser.  My question is…is it better to have a large list of annoyed people, or a smaller list of people with a genuine interest in 3rd party offers?  I see two solutions.  Either the unsubscribe should remove the recipient from the source list – which I appreciate may result in more unsubscribes than necessary.  Otherwise, why not include two unsubscribes – one that is advertiser specific and one that relates to the 3rd party list being used.  This enables better targeting for the list buyer as you can remove people that you know are not interested in certain types of offer, while still giving them the flexibility to receive other types of offer.

Email is a fantastic channel that allows quick, instantly measurable, low cost results when done properly.  Let’s make sure that this continues to be the case and that we don’t end up inviting restrictive legislation by abusing it.

Rupert Harrison
Data Planner
News International Ltd
www.newsint.co.uk