The Pontiflex Blog

Celebrating the End of Append

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

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

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