How Do You Transfer Permissions
Dec 15 2008
Often we see in online and offline business the acquisition of a company by another company. And when this occurs it is not just the change in overall business, or merging of business units… but the switch of email marketing permissions from one brand to another. Now I know that many of you will hammer home that you ONLY gave permission to one brand to email you. I agree with you here, but how does a company go about changing permissions from one brand to another?
The value of the customer and the acquisition does play over to the email list. You can argue this till you are blue in the face, but I can tell you that when someone buys a company they expect that the consumer base is part of that deal. So what to do? How do you properly approach this situation?
I found this occurring in particular with one company that I had subscribed to lately. It was Steve Case’s Revolution Health. Now this company I thought was poised to go big. And maybe they did but in the end they sold/merged the business with another online healthcare/informational portal. Not sure of the overall reasons, but none they less they had to tackle this problem.
They attacked this problem by being communicative and transparent. This is the right way to approach the issue in my opinion. They started a clear series of email campaigns that informed and made clear that a transition was under way. There were a total of 3 stand alone emails to the subscriber base letting them know that as of a certain date that permission was going to be passed to the other brand. Not one touch, but three. I love threes as i believe that it takes more than one touch to call it a campaign and make an impact.
But where I diverge from my feelings on the way that they approached this was the opt out. Basically they phrased the emails so that IF you did not opt out your permissions were passed. Now this is not illegal, but I think that it is not a best practice in privacy and email marketing. I would have rather seen them go above board and state that unless you re-opted in then you would be removed from this new brand list. Why? Well I can tell you that most likely 80 plus percent of the subscribers did nothing. They did not unsub, never saw the email, did not read it all entirely and took zero action to pass the relationship.
What I assume is going to happen is that they will receive the first 1-2 emails from the new brand and will either not read them, junk them, or worse file a spam complaint. Now what value does this in the end pass to the acquiring company? Not much at all. Maybe they will keep 20% of this list just because people have not opted out, or maybe their results will look good for the first 1-2 emails and then tumble down hill. So what might first look like a good result will deteriorate over time to be a poor list of email subscribers.
What they should have done was a true permission pass and simply asked if they wanted to maintain the relationship with this new brand to make sure to either click a link in the email OR re-opt in with the new brand site on a landing page.
Taking the high road might have given them 10-20% of the overall list if communicated properly on the value of the content they will be getting from this new brand that will not be any less than they enjoyed before. Time will tell and I won’t see it as I decided not to continue my own subscription.
- Posted by Dylan Boyd
- @dtboyd
- at 8:13 AM
Published in Behavioral Marketing, Best Practices, Brand Marketing, Deliverability, E-Mail Delivery, E-Mail Marketing, Email News, eMail Marketing Optimization
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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December 16th, 2008 at 2:39 am
Agree with you Dylan. I sold a website with a list a few years ago and followed your approach: people had to opt-in again to stay on the list. After all, nearly every half-decent privacy policy mentions that “we won’t pass on or sell your email address”. This is usually conveniently ignored when the actual business or website is sold.
There are probably legal nuances there as to whether a change of business ownership counts as “selling” the address etc. If a newsletter stays the same, with the same website branding, but the website owners are different, is that OK? etc. etc.
But the biggest problem with mergers and changes in ownership is likely that a list is a very valuable asset and the original owner has a huge financial incentive not to do anything that will decrease its size. I suspect permission principles are more easily sacrificed when there is the promise of $X per subscriber. So perhaps the purchasers should be the ones who need to push more for the permission high road.
Great topic.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I agree with the opt-out approach that was used for 2 reasons:
1) I suspect that if opt-in was used, less than 10% of the list would have been saved
2) With the opt-out approach there’s an intangible benefit of sending emails/newsletters to subscribers’ inboxes, even if they are not engaging. The value is that subscribers will be reminded of your brand when they are ready to engage again. This is particularly relevant in the health environment where acquiring information (interacting with the website) is generally symptomatic, however I think it applies to ecommerce as well.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I would think that the effectiveness in transferring permission would likely parallel the company’s effectiveness in transferring the overall brand equity. If the new entity comes in and essentially blows up the old brand and the product that the users had been accustomed to receiving, they’ll probably have lots of problems. They won’t get the expected value from their acquired users and they’ll probably have lots of problems with emailing them. In this type of scenario they’d better secure new separate permission.
On the other hand, if the transfer is handled delicately and continues delivering the product that the acquired users are expecting without much change, then the users probably won’t be that disturbed by the change and can probably be more likely to get away with an opt-out rather than an opt-in. Perhaps over time they could transition brands by co-branding, etc. and it would seem pretty seamless to the users.