Let’s not spam our subscribers!

That saying could be done in the marketing department: it popped up in my head as soon as I received an email from Mycom, a Dutch electronics vendor. That email arrived in my inbox recently, but I couldn’t remember opting in for it. But before I raced to spamklacht.nl (the Dutch initiative to crack down on spammers) I rememberd to look for a subscription confirmation email: could it have been that they hadn’t sent me anything in quite a while?

Lo and behold, there was a confirmation message in my email archives: from 21st november 2008. 1 year, 6 months and 9 days have past before they started to mail me their weekly newsletter. Talk about slowly building up to the start of the campaign huh?

The thought zipped past my mind that the marketing leader of Mycom must have explained to the marketing team that the subscribers should not be spammed. Of course, that’s probably not true: I suspect that their email program (which they run themselves as far as I know, not through an ESP) wasn’t totally connected between the subscription form and the mailing system, so it took more than a year and a half to arrive in my inbox.

The mailing looks pretty standard, but with a good layout and room to ‘breathe’:

This hibernation of me as a sleeping subscriber (and probably some more people) is actually quite dangerous: not many people check to see whether they ever subscribed for something: when they receive stuff that is unexpected or unknown (anymore) and it looks unsollicited, hitting the spam button is a close thought, real close. Lining up subscriptions to be picked up by the mailing system and campaigns fast is key: both to let subscribers know they’re not forgotten, and to prevent you getting a bad reputation as a ‘blast from the past’ spammer. You as a marketing guru wouldn’t want to wake any sleeping cats would you? They might turn against you.

Sadly I have to close on a negative note: their newest weekly email arrived in my GMail spambox this morning at 6:53 AM. Good GMail spamfilter, bad testing I guess…