My friend and deliverability colleague Josie Garcia sent me this picture yesterday. It's a picture of her printout of a specific page from this blog, from sometime around a hundred years ago. Specifically, it's a post from 2007, where I replied to and rebutted a "cheeky" marketing guy who thought that whole permission thing was overrated. "It's document shredding day here, but I'm keeping this gem," Josie mentioned.
Mr. Cheeky popped up at the time to tell me that he was doing great. He indicated that his "small scale, unsolicited and sustainable" non-permission model was working wonders for him. But what about since then? Not surprisingly, he seems to have moved on to a new career; his blog is long shuttered. But my friend reminds me that what I posted back in 2007 remains solid advice now: Permission rules. If you don't respect permission, you're a spammer, dummy. Forget insults and bad feelings, no permission means you're going to have problems getting your mail delivered to the inbox reliably.
Why listen to us? Josie and I have only been doing this sort of thing for something like fifteen years. Meanwhile, every year, some new cheeky marketing dude wanders by, trying to tell everyone that, all the data and history and experience notwithstanding, permission is suddenly overrated and they've found the One True Other Way...yet mysteriously, they don't seem to be in it for the long haul.
Hmm. Wonder why.
Tags
rant
