Email Best Practices: Getting Permission 

What is 'permission'?

Of course, the concept of permission doesn't apply to direct mail postcards, but when you're dealing with email, it's a critical issue. While of course our technology is designed to ensure that your email is never 'legally' spam, obeying the laws controlling email abuse are not enough to ensure that your email actually gets delivered to your contacts. OfficeAutopilot and SendPepper are permission-based email marketing tools.

So, that means that these tools are not to be used for prospecting or 'cold emailing' or  to anyone who isn't already expecting to hear from you. Your recipients need to have asked to get marketing emails from you AND remember having asked.

Although this rule may seem strict, it's one that's shared by all email service providers (ESPs) who are committed to getting your email delivered to recipients' in-boxes.

Why is Having Permission to Mail So Important?

It's important because if you don't have the kind of permission that we've defined here, people will complain about your email by clicking the 'This Is Spam' button in their email client. When that happens a few too many times, the Internet Service Providers  (ISPs, like Yahoo, AOL, etc.) will quickly stop accepting email from our IP addresses. In order to avoid that fate,

we watch your delivery results like a hawk and will pull the plug on your account as soon as we see a problem.

Worse (for you) though, is what's coming next: domain reputation monitoring. Already, we're starting to see 3rd party services monitor and store reputation data not on our IPs, but on the domains that you're advertising in your emails. That is, your domain.

What that means is that if you abuse email, you're not only ruining our reputation but the reputation of your own website.  And that sticks with you no matter where you email from.

For a detailed and very readable explanation of how all this works or how the system as we know it came to be, read our paper, Getting your Email Delivered: The Battle for Your Inbox.

Getting Permission

You get permission when people give it to you by requesting to receive emails from you on a specific subject. They can do that by filling out a form on your own website that tells them just what they're going to get, or by selecting (NOT neglecting to unselect) a checkbox on a sign up form that asks if they'd like to hear from you.

You can collect business cards at tradeshows IF the people handing them over know that by giving you their card, they're going to be put on your list.  If you have a fishbowl that says

'Win a free iPod' and then you put all those people on your list, people are going to get peeved.  Peeved = compaints and complaints = trouble.

Read this blog post from the head postmaster at AOL to get a sense of what she means by 'requested': http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/12/03/p/

Confirming Permission

The subject of permission confirmation is a contentious one that tends to elicit strong opinions. Let's talk about it. But, let's do that over here.

What do I Have Permission to Send?

You have permission to send only what your contacts specifically requested to receive.  If they asked to get your monthly newsletter but you then send them daily product pitches, they're gonna complain. If they asked to get your seven day e-course on how to weave baskets underwater, but then you send them weekly promotions on scuba gear for the next three years, you'll get complaints.

I know this seems like a drag, but it's the state of the union in the world of email nowadays. If people complain, you're going to see your delivery rates drop not just for complainers but for ALL your email.  So you have to ask yourself, which is better:

• Send to a lot of people who don't care about your email and have your emails end up in spam folders for everyone on your list (including those who DO want it).

• Send only to the people who actually want your email and have it end up in their in-boxes.

Does Permission Expire?

Yes, it sure does. It expires as soon as your contact doesn't want to hear from you anymore. And by that, I don't mean 'when they unsubscribe from your list.'

Because before someone clicks 'this is spam' they'll usually go through a process something like this:

1. Become interested in your subject

2. Find you and subscribe to your list

3. Fill their need, buy something, etc

4. Lose interest in your subject

5. Forget who you are

6. Get annoyed by your email

7. Click 'this is spam'

Somewhere between 'lose interest in your subject' and 'click this is spam,' you lost permission. Did you lose 'legal' permission? Nope. There's no such thing as 'legal permission' because the law doesn't require permission. Permission is required because if recipients feel like they're getting spam in their mailboxes, they don't like their mailbox provider anymore. If they don't like their mailbox provider, they switch boxes. ISPs don't like losing business, so they MUST figure out a way to keep spam out. To end recipients, 'spam' isn't 'email that doesn't comply with federal law'... it's 'email I don't want'.

So the industry made a definition: spam is 'email they don't want'.  And we figure that if you have permission (by our definition above), you'll be pretty much only sending email people want. That is, until they don't want it anymore, which is usually right around stage five above. At stage six, you're asking for trouble. You've lost permission.

"How can we possibly keep these people off our lists when we don't know if a client has moved on to stage five or stage six?"

It's tricky, but here are some ideas:

• If they haven't opened or clicked an email from you in 4 or 6 months, they're probably done with you. Prune them.
• Add a permission reminder to the top of all your emails, reminding them why they're getting your email and how they can remove themselves.

What's a permission reminder? Glad you asked.

Permission Reminders

You've seen permission reminders before in emails you've received. They typically go something like...

'You're receiving this email at [your email address] because you requested to hear from us. If you don't want to anymore, you can unsubscribe here.'

Permission reminders serve two purposes:

1. To remind the recipient where you got their email address so they're presumably less inclined to report you for spamming and...
2. If they DO report you, to prove to the authority that's about to render judgement upon you that despite the complainer's click-of-the-spam-button, you are NOT a spammer and in fact did have permission to email.

It's obviously best to head off complaints before they happen, and if you can jog a recipients memory about who you are and how they ended up on your list, they're less likely to complain.

But when they do complain, your email may end up being the subject of some scrutiny by various authorities including postmasters at major ISPs, IT or abuse folks at some hardware firewall company, or even by our own abuse desk team. When they look at your email, they're going to quickly decide if your email is spam or not spam. If it looks and smells like spam, they may block your domain, our IP, or if it's our team, we may have to have words.

A solid-looking permission reminder may be just the thing to tip the scales in your favor. Like, 'Hey, this email doesn't look so bad and look, it says right here that they signed up for promotional offers while checking out at their webstore.'

So, it's a good idea to add permission reminders to your emails at least occasionally if not for every email. It's a great idea to add permission reminders if you haven't emailed

your list in awhile.

A good permission reminder is friendly, specific, and provable.

Friendly means just what it sounds like. Don't say things like 'this email is not spam and conforms to all applicable federal laws including the Can-Spam Act of 2003.'  That's not friendly, it's combative.

Specific means that the way you got the permission you claim to have is specific to this specific recipient. That is, don't write 'You're getting this email because of your relationship with our company.'  Instead, be specific: 'You're receiving this email because when you downloaded our whitepaper, you opted to subscribe to our newsletter.'  Or, 'You're receiving this because when you checked out of our online store, you also requested to receive occasional offers and sales notices. If you'd like to stop receiving them, please unsubscribe.'

Provable means that, if asked, you could prove that you actually got the permission you claim to have. Again, back to the 'authority' guy into whose hands your email may find itself. Imagine this common scenario: a recipient that you mailed is a tad more savvy about how to mess with deviant emailers than most and they report you not by clicking the 'this is spam' link, but to a major 3rd party blacklist. And suddenly you're blacklisted. That is, WE'RE blacklisted.

Then we're calling or emailing this blacklist provider. And they show us this email and it says, 'You requested to get our newsletter when you bought something from our online store.' Before they're going to remove you/us they'd like to see some proof. So we're calling you. When we do, you should be able to produce a receipt and the URL of the page they opted in on.  If you can, we take that back to the blacklist provider.  If you can't, we have to tell the blacklist provider that we're sorry and it won't happen again because we just fired the offending client. That's you.

FAQs

Some questions we've heard...

"But I know a guy who sends a zillion emails a day to some list he bought off the internet and..."

Relevant Links

• Cloudmark on permission. These guys are 3rd party spam filters that control a zillion mailboxes. Get on their bad side and get filtered all over the place.

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