It is never ok to repurpose someone's email address - especially by putting it on a mailing list - without their express permission. Even if it were ok (which it isn't), it will cause the recipient to mark your email as spam, and that in itself, when it happens enough, will cause your email to get blocked.
As we've talked about at length before, web-based email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, take into account the open rates and click-through rates associated with the email that you send to their users. If your rates are too low, they will start putting your email in the spam folder. But in addition to the obvious concerns and issues related to open rates, there is another aspect of these web-based mail providers - and Gmail in particular - to which nobody gives a thought, even though it is quietly killing email deliverability for countless legitimate, ethical email marketers and other email senders.
You know, sometimes it's the silliest, most boneheaded things which trip us up. This is true for your email too. See if you can spot the mistakes in this email (this is a genuine, unretouched email, other than our changing the name of the service to "Geegaw" in order to protect the hapless).
One of our mottos is "In all things, be honourable." I demand it of our employees. We insist on it with our customers. I strive for it in my personal interactions. And I expect it of others in our industry. Unfortunately, and always to my surprise (as I am eternally pollyannic), my expectations for honourable behaviour among our colleagues and competitors are not always met.
A couple of things happened today which reminded me that a) we're all in this together, and b) not everybody realizes or feels that we're all in this together. What I mean is that legitimate email senders and ISPs really want the same thing: they want to not send or deliver email to people who really don't want it, and they want email that is wanted to be delivered to the people who do want it.
Here's a quandry. CAN-SPAM, best practices, and just being a good mailer all require that you have a working unsubscribe link. But, many spam filters - including some widely deployed spam filters, consider words like "click here to unsubscribe" or "click here to stop receiving these maillings" as an indicator that the email containing the phrase may be spam. So what's an email sender to do?
Over at our email accreditation service, SuretyMail, we strongly urge our senders who provision or otherwise host their customers' outgoing email to give each customer their own outbound IP address.
We got the following in the mail this week from United Airlines: "Watch your email during the week at August 11 to receive a valuable limited-time offer from United for international travel this fall." Something has gone horribly wrong when in order for an email marketing campaign to be effective, you first have to send your customers something via the post office to alert them to watch their inbox.
Challenge response systems have been around long enough now that pretty much everybody has an opinion on them. The end users who use challenge response systems seem to love them. But legitimate email senders often never respond to challenges, and so the end users are actually missing out on a lot of wanted email.
Here's a word that is guaranteed to kill your email deliverability rate: debt. There is so much spam out there talking about debt, that the spam filters are eating just about anything featuring the word, especially in the subject line.