Law Students

Modern Email Marketing: Two odious practices

By joy

Being a Marketer who is focused on all things Internet related, I read a lot of email on a daily basis. I receive a lot of email, too. I can tell you quite honestly that I probably get more email than you in a day. I don’t really want more email that will take attention away from my primary concern, work. And having sent a lot of email (they don’t call it Email Deliverability for nothing) in a previous life, I’m pretty inured to Email Marketing practices - both good and meant with good intentions.

But I don’t know if it’s just me being the proverbial old grump with a full email inbox or what, but some Email Marketing practices of late have gotten pretty obnoxious.

Practice #1: Sending email to a catch all or general email address. We’ve heard the mantra from the opt-in evangelists about how you should not send email to a catch all address (i.e. sales@yourdomain.com or info@yourdomain.com or webmaster@yourdomain.com) because it weakens your deliverability - in terms of potential email bounces.

It isn’t just that though, as a marketer it shows you don’t know jack about the organization you’re marketing to. You’re basically proclaiming you’re too lazy to find out to find out who the decision makers really are in the organization. And that makes you a poor marketer.

Practice #2: Including a mailto: link to the recipients email address in the body of the email (mostly seen in the footer, near the unsubscribe link).

Whoa, wait, what? The first time I noticed this, I thought it was a newbie error on behalf of the sender. Now, I’m seeing the behavior from well known senders using well known Email Marketing services. So, I’m suspicious - because the thinking goes, if you add the recipient’s domain to the email, the email has less of a chance of being rejected by spam filtering software. Because of course you (the recipient) would not want to be using spam filtering software that would reject email with a link to your domain in it. Below is an example of the text:

This email was sent to: blog@cleverhack.com You’ve received this message because you’ve registered to receive email or you’ve made a purchase from us. If you no longer wish to receive email offers from us, unsubscribe here.

Sneaky, huh?

Technorati Tags: Email, Email Deliverability, Email Marketing, Email Addresses, Domains, Footer, Unsubscribe, Spam, Spam Filtering, B2B, B2C

Full post as published by Confessions of a G33k on August 15, 2010 (boomark / email).