Hug The Tiger, But Trust The Monkey...
W00T! Freedom! Ahhh... The light, the warmth, the soft fuzzy motes on the breeze. We're not blocked from emailing anymore! Here's some helpful info for other businesses gleaned from what we learned about trust, authenticity, transparency, and the hair trigger on a shotgun also known as "The Spam Button".
As a small biz (or any biz, really), being banned to the frozen gulag of no email marketing is chilling. A cold wake-up call for sure! Here's a brief backstory:
Grabbing the proverbial tiger by the tail, we recently sent out a mailing to list we got from the organizers of an expo where we had a sponsor's booth. That email was a thing of beauty, and it had freebies in it! Who doesn't love freebies, right? The list was segmented to expo attendees who had supposedly opted-in and further requested info from our specific market sector. So we thought. Bad move, that whole thinking without verifying thing. No sooner did the shiny new email go out to about 350 attendees than the abuse complaints started to roll in. Whoa. Not good. Little did we know that it was about get as worser as worser gets: Banned. Our email service banned us. No more sending. Dude! (Fix it and fix it fast, Young Jedi, or have fun finding your way in the void...)
I did some digging and found some interesting things:
The expo organizer doesn't have opt-in info on their registration forms (not a single form on their site lets registrants know the deal with respect to registrant's contact info), and their privacy policy is fuzzy at best, stating that they may share info with 3rd parties, but it's hard to find that policy (sometimes in the footer, sometimes not) and it's not on the registration form or autoresponder that sends confirmations out to attendees. And, the hits kept a-coming: There was even at least one person who never even attended the expo. Didn't go, so she didn't sign a list. Signed up online maybe, but backed out, maybe, but never attended. the list was supposed to be double-verified and come only with actual attendees on it. The actual expo attendees themselves had no idea that their information was being shared. At least not a crystal clear, drop-dead simple, opt-in/opt-out one. One word for the expo's social trust implementation (and by extension ours?): Fail.
Valuable lesson courtesy of MailChimp, our awesome email service: Don't trust your company's authenticity and your potential customer's goodwill to a third party. Period. Common sense overlooked? Uh, yeah. Our bad.
As a result, we're modifying our business practices with another nugget of common sense: have our own sign-up at any industry events we attend (it's actually already our practice, but we relied on the expo). Don't rely on event organizers to provide us a clean, verified list. We'll take the list we get as an event sponsor, then we'll match our known list with the list we get from the expo, and send out an opt-in only to clear matches. That opt-in will be our list. And then we can (relatively) safely send out our follow-up marketing.
And here's another tasty morsel: Have a form on your site that enables you to send continued information to whomever completes the form? Are they really signing up for a subscription to a newsletter or email list? Say so. Tell them RIGHT ON THE FORM. Better yet, let them tell YOU whether they want in or not. And follow it up in the confirmation email. With many thanks. And an opt-out/unsubscribe link just incase they opted in by mistake. Hey, it happens. Trust me.
Thanks for hanging in there with us, MailChimp. We're not complete n00bs. OK, so maybe we are. But we're fast learners. And we're very easy on the eyes.
Whew. I'm hungry. For some reason I'm totally craving banana splits from the ice cream store right now. I'll have to get me some. Just as soon as I figure out how to get me and this laptop outta this tree. In one piece.
