I run the abuse desk at MailChimp. I can’t tell you how many accounts I’ve had to shut down because of improper use of a tradeshow email list. Seriously, “tradeshow list” is a boilerplate message that I’ve setup in my email program now. The sad part is that tradeshows are supposed to be a great networking opportunity. But too many newbie email marketers mess it up. Here are some tips for dealing with tradeshow lists:
- If you operate a booth at a tradeshow, and you collect business cards from people who visit the booth, send them a personal, one-to-one email ASAP! (use your Crackberry or laptop) with whatever sales pitch you want to give them, and provide a link to your email subscriber form, so you can stay in regular contact. Actually, don’t just give them a link to your email signup form. You know they won’t subscribe (what’s in it for them?). Give them a link to a landing page on your website with a valuable whitepaper, which also contains a link to “receive our newsletter, which contains even more valuable research.” Even better, insert full page advertisements in your whitepaper, that point back to your newsletter signup form.
- Keep those contacts, but categorize them appropriately. A “lead” that you met at a tradeshow is someone you can keep in your CRM to contact some day (“Hi Bob, we met at the Acme Widgets Show back in ’05. If you’ve still got a need for enterprise Acme monitoring services, our company just introduced…”). But that “lead” is NOT someone you can add to a big marketing mailing list. If they receive mass email from you out of the blue, they’ll report you for spamming.
- If you operate a tradeshow booth, and the tradeshow host offers to give you an email list of all attendees, that is NOT a list that you can import into your mass marketing list. At best, you can only send them personal, one-to-one messages before the event (from your own email program, not en masse from an email marketing service), inviting them to your booth. Yes, that’s a royal pain in the you-know-what. Which is why the tradeshow organizer should be doing this emailing for you (because recipients will more likely recognize them than you).
- On rare occasions, we’ve seen tradeshow organizers include opt-in checkboxes, where attendees can request emails from exhibitors at the show. If you can confirm this, then the list may be okay to send a mass email to. But you have to do it soon, and it should be in the context of the tradeshow. Your subject line and intro paragraph of the email should be something like, “See you at the Acme Tradeshow” If you just add this “opt-in list” to your general marketing list, and these attendees get your Quarterly Newsletter out of the blue, they’ll have no idea who you are, or that you got their email from the tradeshow. They’ll report you for spamming.
- If you collect email addresses while exhibiting at a tradeshow, consider keeping that as a separate list, or flagging them in your master database as “From Acme Show 2008″ or something. That way, you can see who came from where, and isolate any email delivery problems by “source of list” if you need to. I’ve seen cases of responsible email marketers with huge, clean lists, that randomly decide to import a list of people their sales team met at a tradeshow. Those tradeshow attendees forget who you are, or receive an email they don’t think is relevant, and report the company for spamming. If they can’t delete all those tradeshow attendees from their list, their entire list is basically tainted.
- Fish bowls are a bad, bad idea. For adding emails to your list, that is. If you’re collecting business cards in a fishbowl at your booth (such as for a prize drawing), you can’t just subscribe all the email addresses from those cards to your email marketing list. You can crack-berry those people and ask them if they want to subscribe for email marketing (see the first tip above for specifics). Or, if your fish bowl has a giant sign on it that says, “Enter to win a prize, AND subscribe for email marketing” then you’re probably okay. Just make sure you send your first email marketing campaign to these people soon after the event, and be sure to refer to the tradeshow in that first email to them (“Hi Jane, thanks for visiting our booth at the Acme Tradeshow…”).
This article was very helpful! Email marketing is gaining on the tratitional medias of TV, print and radio. It is the primary medium of communication for my business. I am in the trade show and event marketing industry. My website, ShowcaseConnections.com, connects the three human components of a trade show: show organizers, exhibitors and service providers. I have access to numerous lists of trade show participants as well as attendees. Thank you for helping me figure out how to make use of the thousand of contact I collect without getting reported for spamming.
[...] are full of old email addresses, and are one of the most common reasons I see senders get blocked. Other reasons include: Fish bowls, sharing lists, and buying [...]
Great article, if everyone knew the legalities of spamming maybe something could be done about it all.
[...] How tradeshow email lists can get you blacklisted [...]
Let’s say I bring back 20 qualified leads from a tradeshow. Can I put them all in a list and send them a single mass e-mail thanking them for visiting the booth (never using it again and switching to one-on-one e-mail after they make contact with me)? I want to be able to include my company’s look along with images in e-mails, and it just isn’t as nice looking in Outlook. Plus, aren’t e-mails with images sent through MailChimp less likely to get caught in spam filters than e-mails sent through other mail services?
I agree about the list when you receive it from someone else – contact them personally first and then see if they are happy for you to add them to your mass marketing list. Good points, well made!
This article is helpful, but at the same time…I’m not sure the end goal is all that useful. If you have 20 people, you ABSOLUTELY should personalize every email. That is what we do. Its not terribly hard to create an html page either. What mailchip does do though is give you a great tracking device.
However, I wanted to use a program to reach more people and to send the less personal emails, such as when a sale is ending or a new sale is starting, or a new feature. What I don’t understand is why people give you emails if they are only going to hit “spam” or “junk.” I asked my wife what she does, and even she says if she wants to stop an email even if she signed up she’ll hit junk or spam. Seriously…how are you ever going to compete. The last thing I want to do is spam, but at the same time, it seems like the only way not to is to do nothing.
Anyway, kudos on the article, it has given us some insight. We are learning and will apologize ahead of time if we are one of those “ignorant” ones who might have started a campaign before doing all the homework we could have.
SB
In your blog post, you said: “Or, if your fish bowl has a giant sign on it that says, “Enter to win a prize, AND subscribe for email marketing” then you’re probably okay. Just make sure you send your first email marketing campaign to these people soon after the event, and be sure to refer to the tradeshow in that first email to them (”Hi Jane, thanks for visiting our booth at the Acme Tradeshow…”).”
In addition our giant sign said you can opt out at any time–even the first email and as well as to the giant sign, we also verbally told every one we got a chance to talk to the same thing that was on the sign…and I still got my account shut down! Why can’t people just hit the “unsubscribe” link instead of the “Report as Spam” button. I think it’s because they’ve tried it with other mail in the past and we’re not removed (I have had that problem myself), but some of us who are willing to honor an unsubscribe are being punished because of the “real spammers” who aren’t willing to honor an unsubscribe.
Are you still experiencing this ? Specifically when sending to large list given to you by the event organizers.
Newbies like myself have used verbage like “tradeshow” in emails when it was indeed a voluntary signup list for news event for my business created at a tradeshow. Unfortunately that is probably hard to discriminate for Mail Chimp and sorry if I messed up.
Wow, what a great reminder to all those trade show exhibitors that want to cut corners. Marketing isn’t about cutting corners but, rather, about creating quality relationships with qualified prospects. If the lead is good, take the time!
Brenda’s email, above, makes me nervous. It sounds like she followed MailChimp’s rules (and the law) to the letter, but was shut down anyway. Does MailChimp have a solid defense/recourse policy in a case like this, or is the bandwidth lacking that would allow account holders to defend themselves before losing their lists and templates?
Hi Jen, our system will algorithmically suspend accounts if we detect a lot of hard bounces or abuse complaints. But it always runs through human review before a hard “shut down” occurs. During the review process, we totally invite (and expect) explanations from the customer.
Thanks, that’s a relief to know!
I did contact and ask for a human review and explain that I had followed the rules and was told due to the high abuse reports, they were shutting down my sending capability:
3/24/10 4:07PM 4.4% abuse rate on campaign “You may recieve a duplicate email in error from us – advanced apology.” Customer was contacted and sending was disabled.
I hate to be critical but I will once again state my thoughts on mailchimp for those who are looking at it.
Strengths: It is superior in design, ease of use, and cost.
Weaknesses: One bad apple and kiss your program good bye. Sometimes, 4.4% could be 1 or 2 people. The numbers we received back were always that low, just a person or two. We tried several attempts to keep within their guidelines, but ultimately, in fear that the next newsletter was going to get rejected, we decided to move on.
To mailchimp. I completely respect your desire to have a near flawless record. But, why won’t you open a “mailgorilla” site for professionals that is a little more flexible than mailchimp? Don’t give it for free at all, make it pay only. If you continue to not make mailchimps’s standards, push them to mailgorilla…and if they can’t keep those standards, then kick them out. I don’t care what anyone says, its extremely hard to keep up with the standards of mailchimp if you are a business. Even if you know you aren’t spamming, its next to impossible to keep that record.
Here’s to hoping one day a mailgorilla comes about!
SB
I’m with Shannon on Mail Gorilla. I know a guy who is a top customer of yours, doing hundreds of thousands in business with you.. and you continue to reinstate his account despite massive spam complaints. We get a few spam complaints are instantly put over the list everytime, I suspect our account will be disabled any minute now.
We have double opt-ins, we have in-person signups, we send automated welcome emails with unsubscribe opps, we send emails with multiple reminders of why they gave us their email, an unusb at the top, unsub at the bottom, and regularly prune/purge our lists of those under 3 stars. People consistently don’t open our emails? Gone! Strange looking email? Gone! Signed up during some kind of special promotion? GONE! What more can we do to police the list except delete it and start over. We did that too. And now we’re going to have to switch ESPs.
Hi Ben, saying “I know a guy” is a bit anecdotal. Can you give me the company, so I can look into it? You can email it to me directly – ben@. Not trying to accuse you of lying, but we get this frequently. I notice you’re working with a “daily deal” type of company. The competition in this space seems to be cutthroat, and so the emotions and rumors go straight to “11″ on the dials right from the start.
Also, if I could be anecdotal for now too, I’ll say that we have no single customer “doing hundreds of thousands in business.” Unless you’re referencing list size. I want to make that point because it’ll help explain what I’m about to say below.
You say that we “continue to reinstate” this customer, despite “massive spam complaints.” That’s a 2-part issue I’d like to address:
Re: How we reinstate: If an account gets suspended, our (human) review team investigates. Then they decide to reinstate or not. They don’t take financials into consideration. We’re not an ESP that has a handful of clients who pay tons of money. We’re the opposite. We have hundreds of thousands of users who each pay small amounts. Because of those financials, our compliance team is not incentivized or motivated in any way to treat high-paying customers any differently. If anything, the bias would work the opposite way you expect — some large senders who’ve “had their way” at other ESPs tend to think they can send whatever they want from MailChimp, and that we’ll go apologize and make amends with the ISPs on their behalf. It gets annoying. Instead, we suspend their accounts or shut them down completely, and many of them are very surprised by that. So yeah, if there were a bias, it’d be against larger senders. But there’s no bias. We look at abuse stats. Not money.
Also, I took a quick look at your MailChimp account (well, what I presume to be your account, based on the domain you used for this comment) and it looks as though our system has sent you some automated warnings, and our human review team has worked with you and reinstated you multiple times. Everybody gets automated warnings. They tend to spook some people, so we’ve calibrated the message to seem less “your account is getting permanently shut down” and more “This is just a heads-up” but if we go too far in that direction, people don’t take them seriously. I *will* say that if trends only get worse over time, the account will probably face shut down, but our team will tell you in advance of that. It’s only when the system detects something extremely bad that an account is permanently shut down automatically.
Re: the “after massive spam complaints” part: If an account received massive spam complaints, it would be automatically shut down (as described above). It’s possible this sender has a large list in comparison to you, but the percentage of allowed complaints is the same. Actually, smaller lists get a slightly more lenient percentage of allowed complaints.
If the domain name that you used for this comment is the same as your website, there’s something broken in your process. Because I just subscribed to your list, and there’s no double opt-in confirmation. It’s single opt-in. And in the single opt-in confirmation email, there’s no option to unsubscribe. That could be part of the problem. I also noticed on that particular website that there’s a big giant “Enter your email to proceed” box on the home page. This implies that I can’t get past this screen in order to take advantage of your deals *unless* I plug in my email address. When people do this (and daily deal sites are increasingly going down this path to increase their list size) they experience ongoing deliverability and abuse problems. This is simply because people are just going to enter fake email addresses into that field (steve@apple, bill@microsoft, etc). And of course the IT groups at Apple, Microsoft, Hotmail, Me.com, etc. are going to automatically blacklist any sender that sends anything to those addresses (they’re called spamtraps). I noticed on this particular website that you do have a link that allows people to skip past the “enter your email” box, but instead of labeling it “no thanks, I’ll subscribe later” it’s labeled, “I’m already a member, let me in!” I know you’re not doing that to deceive people and make them think they *must* signup to proceed. You’re probably doing that just for members to quickly navigate past that screen (though it seemed to cookie me after I became a member). I’m just saying that for first-time visitors, they may not see any way to browse before signing up. So they’ll naturally just plug in fake emails.
And that’s going to lead to ongoing problems.
I’m with Shannon too. And by the way, I have never been reinstated. One time with a small list and that was the end…guess I’m moving on to another service provider, but I still want everyone here to know my opinion.
Hi Brenda, the review team investigated your account, and based on all the data points available from your campaign stats at the time, decided it would not be reinstated. Very sorry it didn’t work out.
The only people I have sign up to receive emails are members of our organisation. They do not sign up online, their details are taken from the application form. The t’s & c’s of membership state we will use the email address for offers and information and will not sell it on. Am I safe to be able to use these contacts? All members know they can either email the office, ring, or pop in and see us to ammend or remove their details.
If expectations are properly set at the time of subscription, your list should be fine to import. If expectations weren’t properly set (as is seemingly the case 99% of the time), subscribers will report the email as spam en masse, and MailChimp’s abuse prevention algorithms may suspend your account. Sorry I can’t give a definitive answer. One thing you could do, if you’re not 100% about the expectations that were set (or if the list is pretty old and hasn’t been contacted regularly), is to email all subscribers from your own mailing system, with a link inviting them to subscribe to your email marketing list.