Morgainelf, are you aware that many “opt-in” lists are full of addresses harvested without permission ? In other words, they lie to companies like yours when they tell you they are selling you “opt-in only” lists ?
What do you like about your job ?
What do you dislike about your job ?
Thanks 
Hi Goo! (Your name always makes me think of Sonic Youth.)
Yep, I’m aware of that. I’m not sure what we do to avoid it - as I said, I don’t work in the division that deals with e-mail, etc. I would consider roping in a co-worker who knows more about it, but then there would be two of us whiling away our days on the Dope and NOTHING would get done around here. 
There are a few things I absolutely love about direct marketing. Direct response advertising - the type of ads that have a specific 800# or code in them to allow the customer to contact the company directly, is really exciting. You get immediate feedback on whether the ads worked or not, and they are incredibly trackable. I can place an ad on the back cover of Parade magazine and put separate code numbers on the ad for each area of the country. Then when the calls come in, we ask for the code on the ad. This gives us immediate insight into (a) where the ad is coming from, (b) how many calls vs. sales we received from that ad (c) the response to the ad vs. total circulation. We can also then overlay purchased demographic information on the customers who purchased, giving us even further insight into our customer base.
Also, direct response advertising gives you immediate feedback on your offers or creative. I can test the same ad with two separate offers and know which offer performed better. Or, I can put the same offer and copy in two ads with two different pictures, and know which picture we should use going forward. The constant analysis and testing is really interesting.
In addition, the call center environment can be really fun. During our busy holiday season we run tons of contests, have giveaways for top sales, throw little parties to keep people motivated, etc. The customers are great, and I look forward to the busy season when “all-hands” are on the phones and I get to interact with customers. They’re really enthusiastic about our products, and it makes my job much more fun to actually speak with the people who are benefitting from my work the rest of the year.
What I dislike has very little to do with the actual profession. My specific job right now is “Business Systems Planner.” It’s sort of a cross between business analyst and consultant. I manage projects, facilitate meetings, and investigate regulations and technology solutions for marketing and the call center. That’s the part I like. The other side of my job is writing technical scope documents for our programmers and testing changes. I really hate that portion, because I’m just not a detail person (or very technical) and it doesn’t suit me at all.
Thanks for asking!
Morganelf you should outsource the scope docs. I know someone who’d be glad to do it. Someone with her own private idaho!
It’s interesting that you enjoy interacting and don’t like details and techincal. From this one data spec, I’m going to conclude that direct mail is yet another industry where the people-person people should be kept away from the technical side.
By the way, I LOVE LOVE LOVE direct mail/marketing data. It is always solid. A lot of people consider it “old-fashioned” or not cool or whatever, and I have no freakin’ idea why. Direct response ad data is the best.
Cognative scientist should use it exclusively.
Unfortunately j.c., they’re paying me to do them, and I can’t afford to pay someone else!
Isn’t the data cool? I love getting the reports, and slicing and dicing the data a million different ways to figure out exactly what’s going on.
I also love the concept of data modeling and building models to figure out whom to mail. Fun, fun, fun.
Whenever I get a call from a telemarketer, and I pick up the phone and say hello, and there’s a several-second pause, I just hang up. Why should I stay on the phone saying “hello? hello? hello?” for 5 seconds before someone will talk to me? That’s a waste of time, not to mention rule.
My question is, don’t a lot of companies who use the predictive dialers just get a lot of hang ups? I mean, who the hell actually stays on the line long enough for the telemarketer to pick up? Isn’t this an inefficient system?
Maybe I should chime in here. My company also does e-mail marketing.
Our lists are also supposed to be opt-in. All our contracts with clients have verbage that spells out that the lists they supply us are opt-in. We have, in the past, fined clients or dropped them altogether because they broke the rules. Our headers are accurate & the unsubscribe link & unsubcribe “return email” feature works. We have real people in customer service to who I forward irate UCE messages to be manually unsubscribed. Mechanically bounced addresses are removed from our lists when the meet certain frequency requirements.
We don’t violate the TOS of our ISP because we are, effectively, our own ISP and we stay within the rules of our downstream suppliers. We don’t “rent” lists although it’s impossible to determine if our clients do.
All that being said, we know we receive lists from clients that are “dirty”. We’ve discussed making an internal scoring system that’ll rate a list’s quality based on bounce rates & other clues to harvested addresses. At this time, at our volume, it’s not deemed practical. Certain rates of bounces - a good indication of dirty lists - are communicated back to the clients. We try hard to be good internet citizens.
We’ve made mistakes. Once we sent a list that, due to a bug, snipped the first character from every email address. It still delivered over 20% successful to people who, no doubt, didn’t want it. We’ve double sent lists at times. These occurrances are pretty rare but they do happen.
Recipients make mistakes, too. They don’t opt-out when they buy things on the internet. They don’t read the fine print that says that if they’re signing up for a contest, they’re also adding their address to a list. They try to send a unsub from an address that does fowarding.
I handled one irate letter where the person said that the unsubscribe process wasn’t working. Three times he tried to spell “unsubscribe” and three times he spelled it three different wrong ways. The inbound parser never caught it.
Spam is a hot-button issue with a lot of people. Our company is working with the DMA to help come to a common set of rules for commercial email. We’re trying to keep the “U” out of UCE. Email is a great communication medium and there’s certain mail we want to receive. If Amazon uses email to mail you a coupon, is that a good thing? If Eddie Bauer sends you appropriate product information on a non-intrusive schedule, it can be a benefit if you really like Eddie Bauer products. (these are examples - we don’t send for these folks).
My point is that email, like paper catalogs, can be used as a benefit to both sender & receiver if the receiver wants to receive the information. We’re trying hard to make sure that every mail we send is wanted by the recipient.
Sorry for the thread hijack but it seemed relevant.