Recently, we had a "good client gone bad" situation that had me pretty wound-up.A client with a moderately sized list, good delivery and engagement loaded up a large amount of new addresses (about a 500% increase in overall number of recipients). This triggered some internal alerts and we immediately started analyzing the list. It wasn't difficult to tell that this list had no business being imported.
So the account was disabled and we reached out to the client.
At this point, I was prepared for a battle. There are two general responses to the type of action that we took:
1. Calm and apologetic "I'm sorry/I didn't understand/I thought these were OK" followed by "what do I need to do to get right with you?
2. The angry "CAN-SPAM says I can do this" argument.
Thankfully, once we were able to talk to him, it fell into the first category. As it turns out, the economy has really hurt his business and he's been searching for ways to increase sales. A business partner suggested trading their email lists, and the potential dollars he saw clouded his judgment. As we discussed the issue, he commented more than once that (paraphrasing) "something about it didn't seem right, but I've just been so desperate for new sales that I didn't allow myself to think through it."
We spent some time going over his program, discussing best practices, and how bad practices damage reputation and hurt his ability to reach the people who really want his products. And he gets it.
The good news is that we were able to clean this up fairly easily and have an appreciative client with a better understanding of email marketing who I look forward to watching grow... the right way.
Kris Dougherty| Director of Operations
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