Legitimate Spam

What's more frustrating than the avalance of spam pushing sexual enhancements, diet pills, and cheap software? The stuff that comes from people who should know better. The regular kind of spam is easily identifiable as garbage. The latter form is companies that are legitimate behaving badly, and they should know better.

Today's villain: Careerbuilder.com. I've started getting emails from their "parterns" advertising cheap diplomas, training, and all kinds of stuff. The link to take you to your communications preferences at the Careerbuilder site brings you to a form that includes no options for preferences and generates errors.

It's this kind of spam, more than the obvious garbage, that makes people hesitant to share their email address or complete online transactions. It poisons the selling environment for everyone. Don't do it.

A Very Bad Web Form

Below is a form on the Houston Chronicle web site. It's used for subscribers (like me) to report a missing paper.

Do you see what's wrong with it?



By default, the check box to opt into advertising email is checked. Now, you can uncheck it, but it's likely that a fair number of people don't notice it and wind up "opting in" (in the strictest sense) to this list.

Tells you something about the quality of the resulting list - something anyone who might pay the Chronicle to use it should know. And it tells you something about the paper's low level of respect for its subscribers' preferences.

Don't trick people into opting in. You'll just give yourself angry customers and filtered emails.

Now Something Nice

In my last post, I criticized Audible.com for their terrible email marketing - bombarding me with too much email, and then making it impossible for me to unsubscribe with a dysfunctional web form. Now I'm going to say something nice about them.

Today in my mail - my postal mail - I got a letter from the CEO of the company, thanking me for trying the service and expressing regret that I didn't sign up for a monthly plan. It also included a phone number and email address for any comments or feedback I had.

Yes, it's a canned letter, but their decision to send it via postal mail is very smart. I read it. Had it come via email it would have just annoyed me more.

Email is great but when you want to really stand out, a piece of paper can be just the thing you need. I'm going to respond to them with my complaints; it will be interesting to see if I hear anything else from them. I'll report back.

How to Lose Customers with Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a great thing, but it's so often abused. Here's a recent experience of mine that stands as a case study in how not to use email marketing.

I recently got a promotional offer for a free month of Audible.com service when I purchased an iPod accessory. Audible is a nifty idea; you can download audiobooks and other spoken word programming and listen to it on your iPod or computer. Great for long drives, plane trips, and all that, right?

So, I signed up. As part of the signup process I had to provide my email preferences. I opted in to some of the email but not all.

I started getting email from Audible. About an email every day or so. That's too much, far too much. So I signed back into Audible and removed some items. I still got a lot of email. So, I went back and told them: no email.

I kept getting email. Lots of it.

Next step: try the global remove instructions in the messages themselves.

I kept getting email. Lots of it.

This weekend, when one of the pestering emails showed up, I just replied in frustration. I got an automated message telling me that in order to make sure these replies are real, I needed to go to the Audible web site and fill out a form. Then, my email would be delivered and replied to.

Fine, fine. I clicked the link. I filled out the form, which asked me for my name, my Audible user name, and all that kind of stuff. I completed it and hit submit.

I then got a second form asking me to enter my user name and email address again. I complied.

This led to an error: my email address is already in the database, so it couldn't be accepted. (Well, no kidding, I'm already a registered user.) Apparently I was being asked to register again for some reason, even though I had just given them my valid user name (which I tested - it's correct).

Net result: it's impossible to actually communicate with Audible because their web forms are broken.

Here's the bottom line, business-wise. I'm not continuing as a paying member. I'm not even going to buy items occasionally from them. In fact, I am setting my spam filter to just kill anything that comes from them. I will never spend a penny with them, or do any kind of business with Audible.

Here's where Audible went wrong:

• When I opted in, they abused that by sending way too much untargeted, uninteresting email.


• When I tried to adjust my preferences, they ignored those preferences.


• When I tried to remove myself altogether, they ignored that and continued to send email.


• When I used their customer support system to let them know there was a problem, broken web forms kept me from contacting them.

It's a combination of bad faith and incompetence, and it's a reason to never trust Audible with my email address.

That's how you use email marketing to drive customers away. Don't make the mistakes that Audible makes.

More on Sony

The Houston Chronicle's TechBlog continues to cover the Sony DRM rootkit story with some observations on how Sony is blowing it in light of the discovery of their very bad technology choice.

Once bad or embarrassing news about your organization comes to light, you have an opportunity to repair some damage, or make it worse. Sony is making it worse by demonstrating cluelessness about why what they've done has customers angry.

And, of course, the story took on a life of its own via blogs, and has now made it into the mainstream media.

Hating Your Customers

"Product" is one of the four p's of marketing. (Remember those?) You have to have a product that people want.

You also, some need to be reminded, have to design that product so it meets the customer's needs - including the need not to be damaged by the product.

Apparently this is a problem for Sony, as the Houston Chronicle's TechBlog notes. It's quite a tale; a CD whose copy protection not only keeps customers from using the CD in legal ways (which is bad enough) but actually messes with their PCs.

Assaulting your customers is not a strategy for building brand loyalty. No wonder the music industry is having so much trouble. Do they just hate their customers?