Article
Affiliate Marketers and Email: Not Perfect Together
By Shawn Collins
Apr 14, 2005, 09:01

We often hear about best practices in affiliate marketing, and for the most part, these are followed by the majority of players in the space. But one spot where worst practices continually prevail is when affiliate marketers mess with email.

Out of frustration, confusion and laziness, affiliate marketers are making some bad choices when it comes to email usage, and it’s time somebody dropped a dime on them.

Yes, I CAN-SPAM
There was much ballyhoo with the introduction of the CAN-SPAM law among affiliate marketers. It was going to take out the trash for the industry. Affiliate programs were going to change the way they did things and police the email practices of their affiliates.

But a year later, the clueless and careless are engaging in dangerous affiliate liaisons. According to data I collected from affiliate managers for the AffStat 2005 Report, only 36 percent of affiliate managers are making an email suppression list available to their affiliates.

Among those surveyed, four percent said they do not allow affiliates to email. A full 48 percent of affiliate managers do not make a suppression list available to affiliates, and most frightening of all, 12 percent do not know whether they make a suppression list available or not.

Recently, one of my affiliates informed me that they were passing on my offer, because of the “unusual suppression list method of cleaning the list.” The unusual method is using the services of UnsubCentral  to manage both ours and the affiliate’s suppression lists, which can be uploaded via MD5 encryption.

The alternative that the affiliate recommends is for me to provide my company’s suppression list to them. Besides violating pretty much any Privacy Policy, that’s also a good way to kick the door wide open for somebody to really do damage to one’s email reputation.

Affiliate managers have to realize that they are responsible for the actions of their affiliates. As reported by Aunty Spam, there is a clause in CAN-SPAM known as the McCain Amendment. Basically, it says that even though you didn’t click the send button, if you profit from spam sent by your affiliates, you are on the hook with the FTC for breaking the law.

Then again, what can we expect, since so many affiliate managers willfully violate CAN-SPAM on a regular basis with their affiliate recruiting via email?

Affiliate managers cited email as the most effective tool for recruiting affiliates in the AffStat 2005 Report. But as any affiliate can attest, those canned recruitment emails virtually never conform to the basics of CAN-SPAM, such as an opt-out link and mailing address.

It’s the BCC Field, Stupid!
Last week, I received email from two different affiliate managers where my email address was in the To: field, along with hundreds of other affiliates.

I wrote to a prominent affiliate that was on one of the lists with me, and she replied that she is “constantly amazed at how many people don’t know how to use BCC. This happens all the time.”

The first merchant email that exposed my email to hundreds of people was a basic communication with news on the affiliate program. But the email I got later in the week was not just throwing my email out there to a big list of other affiliates, it was also a nastygram.

The email stated how the affiliate manager “would love nothing more than to continue our partnership, but please note if accumulated sales have not reached five transactions or more within the 45-day period, we will unfortunately have to terminate the account.”

He followed by saying “Please do no (sic) take this as a personal attack.” Well, I didn’t take it as a personal attack, as I’d long since moved on to a competitor of this affiliate program that converted better. But this affiliate manager was in for plenty of personal attacks after that.

Fifteen minutes after the original email, I received another email from him trying to recall the original. Sorry bucko, that feature didn’t work.

But what did work was the send button on the dozen emails that followed from angry affiliates. Of course, all of the complainers had to grandstand and perpetuate the aggravation for all by copying everybody on each successive email.

Serious question -- are there still people that don’t get BCC?

Your Challenge, My Response
Each time I send out an affiliate newsletter or other communication to affiliates, I get a deluge of challenge/response emails.

If you are not aware of this phenomenon, challenge/response is a type of anti-spam service designed to shift the filtering workload from the recipient to the spammer. While it sounds good, the concept is inherently flawed in that the only people actually impacted by it are legitimate senders.

Spam is a real hassle and I get that people adopt this tactic out of desperation, and they really don't understand the consequences of what they're doing. But it's an increasing hassle that could be greatly reduced if affiliates would simply white list the affiliate managers for the affiliate programs they promote.

These services are not so smart, as they don't even recognize my address and add it to the white list when an affiliate sends me email first.

In a recent poll of affiliate managers on the AffiliateManager.net forum, 88 percent stated that they have to repeatedly respond to challenge/response emails to reach their affiliates by email.

Here are some of the reasons why affiliates should stop using challenge/response immediately:

High false positive and false negative rates: False positives are when non-spam is treated as spam. And false negatives are when spam is treated as non-spam, due to spoofing.

Beast of burden: Spam management tools should place the burden on the spammer or the person that set up the tool (the email recipient). But challenge/response puts the burden on the sender and the spammers are unaffected. Additionally, challenge/response often places the burden on third parties due to spoofed-sender spam or virus mail.

Affiliates branded as spammers: Challenge/response users that blindly send challenges to all incoming mail, without validating headers, may very well find themselves added to SpamCop and other spam lists.

You're violating my privacy: When you use a challenge/response service, they have access to OUR email. For this reason, my response to your challenge may well be to click Delete. After all, it’s an A and B conversation, and I want your C-R service to C their way out of it before I provide sensitive information.

Spy vs. spy: What happens when two challenge/response users try to email each other? The world may never know, because neither will ever receive the other's email.

ABCC’s of Email for Affiliate Marketers
It’s not that hard, really. But let me break it down for the folks that aren’t getting it. CAN-SPAM is for real -- just follow the rules. If you are sending an email to a list of people, use BCC (that’s blind carbon copy), so nobody sees the email addresses of the others. You could also use mail merge and personalize the correspondence. Finally, knock off the challenge/response thing. If you need a tool to manage YOUR email problem, try using SpamBayes as your solution. 

Shawn Collins is CEO of Shawn Collins Consulting, an affiliate program management agency, and an organizer of the Affiliate Summit 2005 conference, taking place June 13-14, 2005 in Las Vegas. He authored the book Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants and the AffStat affiliate marketing benchmark reports.