Stalkers

I'm in France right now. I am checking my voicemail but I am not calling anyone back unless it's important because, well, the trip is part vacation (as much as I can make it), the time difference is inconvenient, and it's expensive unless I happen to be at my PC and able to use Skype - and my connectivity is so-so, so Skype is so-so.

A while back I was on a printer's web site, and I filled out a form to receive a packet of samples of their work. That arrived just before I left the U.S. They called me a week ago - your basic follow-up call, did I receive the samples, did I have questions, and so on. I listened to voicemail. Obviously not a call I was going to return from France.

Of course, over the last week, I've gotten four more messages from them. Two were just silence because in a three-minute period they called me twice and hung up, and then finally called again and left a message. Still, that comes out to one call per business day. To follow up on a packet of printing samples for someone who did not indicate any immediate need for their services.

(I can see a log of all my incoming calls from the web site of my VoIP provider, which is how I know it was them.)

After the fifth call they send me an email. I replied to that; I told them that I'd gotten the package, thank you so much, and that five calls in a week was way too many, especially when you'd have to return the calls (or just listen to the voicemails) by dialing from Europe. Maybe I'm just in a mood today, but I added that I felt like I had a new stalker.

No reply yet (that was just a few minutes ago) but perhaps they'll learn a lesson: follow up is just fine, but calling someone over and over and over again for no obvious reason is not likely to earn customers. Frankly, I'm afraid to use them now; I half expect my account rep would show up in my yard throwing pebbles at my bedroom window.

"Marketing Sociopathy"

Eric Weaver uses the term "marketing sociopathy" to describe this stunt from Miller Brewing. I can't think of a more apt term.

I've railed in the past about marketing practices that treat consumers like prey. Instead of understanding their needs - and their dislikes - some marketers want to just keep poking and prodding them to get short-term results at the expense of long term business. So when I read about Miller hunting down a customer who gave them a fake email address by tracking IP addresses - and then writing to them with a "ha! we found you!" note - I am tempted to just roll my eyes.

Except, of course, fools like the Miller Brewing marketing team wreck the environment for all marketers. So is it any surprise to find that five states are pondering "do-not-email" registries?

I think that these kind of registries are a bad approach to controlling spam and email phishing. But I can't blame lawmakers for responding to consumer frustration with these kinds of ideas. Especially not with supposedly-reputable companies like Miller adding to the problem.

The Postage Bill

The big topic in online marketing this week is the announcment that AOL will be using Goodmail to "vet" email and handle it differently that the standard bulk email, which has to run a gauntlet of spam filters to get delivered. Senders will pay between a quarter-cent and a cent for the Goodmail service.

Reaction from online marketers has been unsurprising; who wants to pay more for anything? MarketingVox reports of Return Path's reaction to the news: it will hurt legitimate marketers.

Yes, it will. A little bit. It is, however, still a good idea. (If marketers had the ability to kipnap consumers, force they eyeballs open, and make them watch commercials for an hour a day, it would be helpful. Taking that privilege away would hurt. It would still be a good idea.)

Seth Godin gets it. Spam is caused by the warped economics of email, where the illusion that it's free to send messages makes ROI so easy to achieve that there's a huge incentive to abuse the medium.

This is unsustainable. First of all, ISPs are not going to pay the significant costs of infrastructure (mail servers, storage, bandwidth) to deliver spam. When you're the size of AOL, those costs are enormous. That's why we've got the current spam filtering system, where marketers have to accept that a certain portion of messages, no matter how carefully we've crafted our opt-in policies and created relevant content and cleaned our databases, are just never getting to the recipient who asked for them.

Second, consumers don't want spam, and the more spam there is, the harder it is for real marketers to use email successfully. If you're a legitimate marketer, spam is bad for you.

Personally, I'd prefer paying a small fee to know a message is getting delivered over playing an endless game of spam filter roulette and hoping people are getting what I'm sending.

Yes, the cost of email is going up. A bit. The message for marketers is simple: make sure that your email is good, relevant stuff with a compelling ROI that won't be wrecked by a penny extra delivery cost. If your payback is that thin, go back and rethink your programs.

Consumers don't want spam, and companies like AOL are responding to that. You can complain about it, or you can deal with the reality - and succeed in a changing environment. Your choice.

Seth Godin Agrees with Me

... and other follow-up on keeping your promises.

1. Seth makes the same point I did in this succint post.

2. I have more on my anecdote. Just after posting it, I got a mailing from a VP at the bank in question responsible for small business accounts inviting me to come be a customer. It included his or her (one of those names where you can't tell) email address, so I responded with an email explaining that I'd tried to be their customer, I really had, but they prevented it from happening.

I did get a response:

The purpose of my letter, with my cel phone number, office number and email address was to have you contact me direct to open your account not contact telephone banking. I am local and my follow up is excellent.

Which pretty much misses the point; something's wrong if you have to do an end run around your organization's normal functioning to make customers happy.