[thelist] Checking to see that an email account exists

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Wed Jul 17 13:59:01 CDT 2002


Sorry to be replying so late to these messages. Just catching up on mail
because of a computer outage.

At 08:19 PM 7/17/2002, Arlen.P.Walker at jci.com wrote:
>The argument against this procedure is that a significant percentage of
>people don't confirm. But ISTM that simply means they didn't want the
>service in the first place, and you wouldn't have achieved anything by
>having them on your list, anyway. If someone wants to be on your list,
>they'll confirm. If they don't want to be on your list, why put them on
>it?

Arlen, your logic is sound. However, the clueless management and marketing
folks (not that all of them are clueless, of course) are more worried about
another thing. They want to inflate subscription figures so that the sales
guys can go sell ads in the newsletters for more money. "Send your message
to 45000 [field] professionals" sounds a lot more appealing than "Send your
message to 15000 professionals who are really interested in [field]".

I once used to be the Webmaster of India's largest IT portal (to remain
nameless). Management at that company was brain-dead (they were from a
print media background), and I had to fight several "get a clue" battles.
One of them was the issue of "double opt-in" versus single opt-in. I argued
that double was the ethical thing to do, and it would ensure that only
interested readers would confirm their subscriptions. The President,
however, was convinced that if we did that, half the people wouldn't
confirm it. This was unacceptable to him. He *wanted* the large subscriber
count for marketing.

At the time, I strongly opposed HTML newsletters and so we sent only plain
text ones. (My boss was also the ultimate miser, so the "it will cost us
less in bandwidth charges" argument helped me.) From analysing the site
stats after sending the newsletters and making some educated guesses, it
was clear to me that only about 25% of the subscribers were even opening
the newsletter and clicking on the links in it. But hey, the marketing guys
could sell 45K subscribers to potential advertisers. :(

That concludes my war story.

Regards,

Madhu
PS: Part 2 of this was when they decided to split one newsletter into two
separate ones, and then duplicated the first one's subscriber list to the
second one. They then had 90,000 subscribers. Magical, isn't it?

<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net




More information about the thelist mailing list