The Email Wars

In the world of multichannel and location opt in and opt out how do you keep your lists in sync? Can you?

Let me put some scenarios on the table to give you some real world examples of challenges I have been facing in some recent work with a retailer.

1. Your customer opts in from your site. First time here and they subscribe to your newsletter. They want to simply get your newsletter about alerts and deals. Easy and done.

2. They buy some merchandise from you and at the checkout, since you had the box checked (bad idea) they opted in again to your newsletter through your store. Simple enough as I am sure you would not duplicate the opt in as you already have that record and relationship in place. Or do you. Best idea here is to flag the change in record date and location of subscription again OR at least have a data point in your subscriber record to reflect this secondary opt in. Also at risk here depending on how you have your welcome stream set up is triggering: another double opt in message, not letting them know that they are already subscribed and maybe pointing them in another direction for something else to subscribe to (hey maybe a customer communications preference center?), or making sure that you do not start your welcome or email customer lifecycle string again and quickly make yourself look foolish. Okay easy to handle.

3. They come to your store and your clerk asks them for their email address (that I assume you just want to append the customer record in your CRM to the merchandise that they purchased and the location) that you add to your file. Hope you remember the examples I gave in the 2nd one above as all of those could happen again here.

4. They are on their mobile device and text in to subscribe to something you are doing for a mobile contest. Ready, the shampoo effect here of lather, rinse, repeat of the examples above.

OK here is the kicker. What happens in between any of these steps when they opt out and then proceed to any one of the examples later? Are you welcoming them back? Do you know? Do you have a new string of a re-welcome email or do you just turn a blind eye to it as you were not prepared for this and don’t have programs in place to think about this?

Do you care?

What throws all of this for a loop and can cause so many issues are that there are 15 other scenarios I have played with from partners, contests, product registration etc that can really make things ugly.

Where does opt in start and end and then begin again? AND do you have your systems set up to handle this?

Many of the clients that I have worked with have not thought about any of this and stare blankly at me when I walk through the big list that I have accumulated from real world projects i have worked on over the past years. I can tell you that it can be a data nightmare and an even bigger nightmare for the customer or you if you are dealing with a spam complaint from any ISP.

These are the things that keep me up and night thinking about how silos keep us all from having one hell of a job that most normal people not in this space ever confront, realize of can comprehend.

Time to audit your own programs, make a flow chart, hell draw it on a piece os scrap paper or a white board and see just how many places you are set up to not deliver the right program. It might shock you to find all of this out.

But look, I have been there as have many 1000s of other people and you can work through it. Knowing about it is the first step in making a plan. Good luck.