The Pontiflex Blog

Celebrating the End of Append

The Magill Report, an industry trade publication for email marketing professionals, reported yesterday on the “bombshell” news that Experian CheetahMail, the world’s largest sender of commercial email, has decided to prohibit email appending by its clients.

Email appending has long been a controversial list growth tactic, in which email addresses are attached (or “appended”) to offline customer records (e.g., name + postal address) in order to send those customers email marketing communications. Appended recipients have never explicitly opted-in to receive email from the organizations conducting the append, their permission to receive email is “assumed” by virtue of having an existing business relationship (“EBR”) with the appending organization.

While perfectly legal under the U.S.’s national anti-spam law, the CAN-SPAM Act, the practice has long run afoul of consumer privacy advocates’ perspectives on ethical email marketing practices, as well as ISPs and end-recipients/consumers privacy expectations themselves.  Last year MAAWG, the largest trade group representing ISPs and “anti-abuse desk” professionals, issued a formal declaration stating that email append is “a direct violation of core MAAWG values” and “an abusive practice.”

As Experian CheetahMail’s Privacy Leader Ben Isaacson wrote in a blog post last week, 10 years ago marketers faced the challenge of having minimal online presences and email addresses to mail to, creating greater urgency around, and ESP and marketing organization support for, practices like email append in order to quickly ramp up email marketing database sizes.  Even then, the practice was a major trigger of ISP blocking and deliverability problems, and has only grown in deliverability disfavor since then.  As Isaacson explains, by now, marketers have achieved “critical mass online and no longer needed this acquisition method to bolster their email programs.  Today’s offline marketers collect customer emails at every point of sale, and even through new mobile and social media channels.  There is no doubt that if a customer wants to subscribe to a marketers’ email list, they have ample opportunities to do so.“

Ben’s last point is especially noteworthy. He is rightfully saying that, by now, in the year 2012, it is time for the email marketing industry to stop treating customers like children who need email marketing opt-in decisions to be made for them. That by now, we should respect that everyone knows how to opt-in to receive the marketing communications that they actually want to receive by their own volition, and through multiple channels (whereas in the early days, they may have had to shlep to a desktop computer, then find a single web site and then single reg page and opt-in). And this ESPECIALLY applies to brands with whom they know and have an EBR with.

Most of all, this policy shift by Experian CheetahMail reflects forward thinking that embraces the notion that a paradigm shift toward “Craved-For Marketing” has occurred, and the world will never be the same. This shift is impacting the entire world of marketing, not just email’s quirky little part of it: People now fast-forward through TV commercials using their DVR, unless they actually are intrigued enough by the commercial’s content to continue watching it.  Gone are the days of  being subjected to the tyranny of media and marketers forcing commercials down their throats. And “The DVR-Effect” impacts every marketing channel you can think of.

Craved-For Marketing is no easy challenge. The gauntlet has been laid down, and marketers need to be more imaginative about what they can do with the huge opportunity presented to them by a subscriber’s actual, explicit opt-in. There is a large role for agencies and professional services groups within ESPs to step up to this challenge and I look forward to seeing more email marketers inject creativity and FUN into their email marketing efforts in 2012 and beyond. (See bullet #3 on my last post, “2012 Email Marketing Recommendations“).

I, for one, think that Experian CheetahMail has made the right decision by ending the practice of email append, and applaud them for doing so.

-Jordan Cohen, VP of Business Development

January 25, 2012 at 12:45 pm Jordan Cohen Leave a comment

Laos in Harmony

Just last week, we wrote that Pontiflex’s Kilvin Johnson is now appearing on Discovery ID’s television show SCORNED. Well this week, we have more news to share about one of our employees! Clinton Regis, our very own Systems Administrator Extraordinaire, shared with us today that his group, Laos In Harmony, just released a single on iTunes and Amazon MP3. Laos in Harmony is a gospel music ministry based in Brooklyn, New York. The group’s name is derived from the Greek word “Laos” which means “people,” hence “Laos in Harmony.”

To hear the single on iTunes, click here. To listen on Amazon, click here. For more information, visit Laos In Harmony. You can also “Like” the group on Facebook and follow them on Twitter (@laosinharmony).

January 24, 2012 at 1:56 pm Tiffany Sumner Leave a comment

Pontiflex’s Kilvin Johnson Appears on SCORNED

According to the Discovery ID website, SCORNED: LOVE KILLS uncovers “crimes of passion sparked by a spurned lover’s snap from provocative paramour to predacious threat.” Wow. That sounds juicy. And to make it even more exciting, Pontiflex’s Kilvin Johnson will be appearing on the show!

Without giving too much away, let’s just say that Saturday night’s episode will get pretty steamy when Kilvin’s character, Jeff Wilson, gets involved with a married woman. Will Wilson survive a love triangle? Will his love affair end tragically? Oh, we’re beside ourselves with anticipation…

Tune in to Discovery ID at 10 PM EST to find out what happens to Jeff Wilson (and Pontiflex’s Kilvin Johnson) on SCORNED.

In the meantime, watch a clip of the show.

January 19, 2012 at 2:19 pm Tiffany Sumner Leave a comment

January 18, 2012 at 2:20 pm Stacy Huggins Leave a comment

2012 Email Marketing Recommendations

Rather than predicting what will come in 2012, I have 3 recommendations to make. They are:

1) Launch your mobile website if you haven’t already.  It just makes sense that the easier you make it for people to shop on their smartphones, the more likely they will be to do it (and to do it again, and again…)  Nothing bothers me more than receiving a brilliantly mobile-optimized email template that then links to a non-mobile optimized web site.  Seriously, what’s the point?  Those who create an end-to-end mobile optimized experience will reap the rewards in 2012 and beyond.

2) Adopt an email first mentality.  Email marketers are feeling a ton of pressure to weave “social integration” and even, gasp — “Social CRM” — into their 2012 planning, when many aren’t even using their own email clickstream data yet to improve email messaging segmentation and relevancy.  Tell your CEO/CMO/Power-That-Be to chill and explain how much more you stand to gain by being given the resources you need to get the foundation of your email house in order.

3) Be CREATIVE.  Regardless of where you stand on Groupon, those guys are email marketing royalty, with 150MM+ subscribers, a daily send schedule, and virtually zero problems when it comes to deliverability.  That’s right — Groupon is a company that knows how to get into the inbox every time. The secret to their success?  Check out the video or read the transcript of their feature on 60 Minutes last Sunday.

Stahl: What you did was you took a spam business, a junk mail business, and somehow made it entertaining and cool.

Mason: We do realize that we’re sending people an email every single day, and that could get annoying. So there’s gotta be something else there that keeps you engaged and keeps you from un-subscribing.

That something is the absurdist humor in the daily deal write-ups. Four hundred writers and editors – more than most newsrooms – come up with hundreds of these pitches a day, with twists of phrases and logic. Here’s one for a dentist: “Humans developed smiles as a way to deflect predators in the wild and former bosses in the grocery store.”

The loopy write-ups give Groupon its personality, which seems to seep down from the very top….

Aspire to make your emails craved by recipients in 2012. Invest in great creative and witty writing, and the world will be your oyster.

Good luck!

Jordan Cohen, VP of Business Development

January 17, 2012 at 3:20 pm Jordan Cohen Leave a comment