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I can no longer recommend MailChimp

grahamcluley.com

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Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#61

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

jlgaddis wrote: post #47
stefan69 wrote: post #23

As a marketer, one of the issues I run into is to subscribe someone, who filled a contact form on my website, to an email automation series (usually to nudge them towards taking an extra action while we scramble to get back to them). Problem is, once the user filled up the contact form to make an enquiry, he is unlikely to go to his/her inbox to confirm... a subscription link. I do think double opt-in is the way forw…

> Problem is, once the user filled up the contact form to make an enquiry, he is unlikely to go to his/her inbox to confirm... a subscription link. Or, worded another way: the user really doesn't give a damn about your subscription. If they can't be bothered enough to take a few seconds to open one e-mail message and click on a single link, then whatever you're offering obviously isn't something that they actually wa…

My (somewhat glib) opinion:

Marketers want quantity; salespeople want quality.

It's because that's what each one is paid for -- and so companies end up paying too much for marketers to undercut their salesteams' effectiveness because they misaligned the incentives, pay for marketing they don't need (or even harms them!), and then sit there wondering why it's not translating into sales (or worse, saturates salespeople with duds and costs sales).

I used work in marketing and my (slightly exaggerated) opinion is you should fire everyone on your marketing team, hire more salespeople, a socialmedia person, and maybe a single dedicated person to track overall sales performance.

But what's the point of marketing? You should be selling from that first contact -- and if you have two teams doing the same job with differing incentive structures, no wonder your organization is inefficient and pulling at different goals.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#62

Post by notahacker »

pavlov wrote: post #12

This only affects signup forms hosted by MailChimp. If you build your own form and use their API for signups, there has never been a requirement for double opt-in. So I don't know if this is such a dramatic change -- depends on how many people use the default forms instead of an integrated signup experience.

Yeah, don't understand some of the responses which seem to assume this change will make MailChimp any more spammer-friendly. If you want to spam with MailChimp (or for that matter most other list providers) you import the long list of people you want to spam in csv form and disregard warnings about only importing emails from people if they've previously expressed interest in receiving notifications from you. Double opt in for new signups makes no difference.

MailChimp's ability to be regarded as a non-spammy mailing list provider depends mainly on them weeding out customers who import lists of people who haven't expressed any interest to indiscriminately blast mailshots, not on requiring an additional step after an individual actually visits a website, types in an email and clicks a button sending a post request to the mailing list.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#63

Post by BillinghamJ »

rconti wrote: post #55
dharmon wrote: post #2

They haven't "gone bananas". Removing double opt-in means more subscribers, which means higher revenue for them. Their revenue is based on subscriber counts, no matter how they were obtained. I hope everyone else does what I do: any bulk emails I did not subscribe to get marked as spam in gmail. Even a company the size of mailchimp can't cycle and "warm" email servers fast enough if a critical mass of people are tagg…

As someone who gets a lot of newsletters from idiots who still think they own the GMail address I've had for 13 years, I'm always afraid marking things as Spam will hurt my experience more than the spammers -- eg, I'm worried it'll lower my account's spam threshold and cause more false positives in my spam folder (which i never, ever check.. and on the rare occasion I do, I occasionally notice I've been 'missing' a n…

Are there actually any newsletters that you genuinely _want_ to receive?

Personally I’d be really pleased if I could tell Gmail to simply ignore anything even remotely newsletter-related, as I would never voluntarily subscribe to one.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#64

Post by BillinghamJ »

austinjp wrote: post #58
civilian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, the "Spam" button is a true signal. A company I worked for had problems with the number of times people hit 'spam' on the emails (not even a newsletter, but transactional emails), and AWS SimpleEmailService put us on probation. I got to write a worker task that would consume the queue of "someone marked you as spam" from SES and remove them from our email list.

Forgive the naivety, can you explain a little? From what I understand from this: You sent emails from AWS to subscribers. Some recipients hit the spam button in Gmail. You received a message for every email that had been flagged as spam, including the recipient details. Is that correct? What exactly happens when I hit the spam button in Gmail?

Yes that’s correct. Email senders are informed when you mark email as spam so they can add you to an unsubscribe list automatically.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#65

Post by caf »

danielfoster wrote: post #59
Nition wrote: post #32

From MailChimp's second post[1]: > More and more business owners are bringing up double opt-in. What they’ve been saying is that double opt-in is not an easy journey for their customers. Some go so far as to say that double opt-in is “broken.” I would go so far as to say if customers cannot be bothered clicking one confirmation link in an email, they didn't really care about your newsletters. [1] https://blog.mailchi…

I used Mailchimp to collect email addresses for an beta user waitlist in 2015. I eventually used a work-around to disable double opt-in because so many users had signed up, never clicked the confirmation email, and were then confused why they never received access to our product when others had. As a user I also prefer single opt-in. If I sign up for something, I want to be signed up. Clicking confirmation links is a…

Here's the thing, though.

As a user, if I start getting your mailing list emails because someone else decided to sign me up and there was no confirmation, I'm going to mark it as spam.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#66

Post by BillinghamJ »

devdad wrote: post #21
seizeheures wrote: post #5

What reliable service should one use then? MailChimp is still pretty much the go-to option for me

Sendgrid is solid.

I tried using it once. It did not seem solid. It didn’t support 2FA, and required my actual account username and password to send email from the server.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#68

Post by mancerayder »

makmanalp wrote: post #33
ungzd wrote: post #20

That is not problem of Mailchimp, it's problem of culture and "best practices". It's really annoying and it became annoying long before this change. I receive lots of such emails not only from Mailchimp. At least Mailchimp has one-click unsubscribing, most custom-built mailing list systems don't have it, requiring to log in or just not working. The problem with Mailchimp is: - Spam filters work mediocre, despite AI h…

> most custom-built mailing list systems don't have it, requiring to log in or just not working Does this violate CAN-SPAM? https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can... > You can’t ... make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request

It's sometimes grey. One example I can give is Expedia, which provides me with a monthly 'Your [Month] Statement is Ready'-type of thing, even though I've maybe used the service once in my life to buy airplane tickets. You can't unsubscribe since it's not 'marketing' and e-mailing support didn't help either. Yet, it's marketing, because they offer promotional links ("earn free yadda yadda") and has Citi advertising below it.

Another one is 'Oh, wow, you've been getting some profile views!' that LinkedIn and other like to do. That's indirect promotion of their services. Couched as a reminder.

Today, after not logging into Facebook for a while, received an e-mail that someone commented on their profiles. Another of the same.

It can be argued that these is all a form of promotion, but this would take a less-business-friendly political climate to accomplish, if you ask me.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#69

Post by caf »

NoPiece wrote: post #38

They are just changing the setting, and creating a new default. Not sure why a user of MailChimp would feel the need to switch, or complain they "only" have 7 days to switch the setting to what they want. That's not an unreasonable burden.

This is explained near the end of the article:

Changing the settings for my own mailing list (which of course, I did) isn't actually a solution. Sure, it stops toerags using my newsletter as an email bomb but it doesn't stop many more MailChimp-run mailing lists switching to a system that will increase the amount of unwanted emails flying around the internet.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#70

Post by xster »

Not a flippant response:

Curious why this isn't the default mode of operation:

  - Business sends spam
  - Gmail users mark spam as spam
  - Gmail starts putting all emails from business as spam for all Gmail users
  - Business fails
  - New businesses don't send spam
I can't imagine Gmail being in bed with spammers since Gmail gets paid when spammers pay Gmail to put spam on top of all your emails, not when spam is in your emails.
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