Email Marketing News and Tips

I had an interesting call with a client today.  It seems that she has a registration page that is attracting more than its fair share of bad email addresses.  By bad I mean they appear to be syntactically correct, but not real people.  But here’s the catch; there is no incentive whatsoever for people not genuinely interested in receiving their emails.  No sweepstakes, no ipod giveaways, no vacations in Aruba.

Stranger still is the fact that where there were open fields in the registration page (where one could enter free-form data rather than choosing from drop-downs), there was often "spammy" data, such as URLs to site advertising Viagra sales where there should have been a company name (for instance).

Why would anyone in their right mind take the time to find registration pages and sign up bogus email addresses with accompanying junk information?  We asked ourselves the same question, and can only conclude that this is a new tactic for "spammers".  Perhaps one of the more "techie" ones out there wrote a program that crawls the Web looking for registration pages, and when it finds one it signs up bogus data in the hopes that it will somehow drive traffic to the spam site to buy Viagra.   

Sounds harmless, but in reality it is compromising the integrity of the client’s data, and creates a list hygiene issue that is costing real dollars and effort to remedy.  As if we need another reason to despise these parasites of the Web! 

On the bright side, this issue has forced our client to implement a double opt-in process that we expect will end this problem, and is a best practice for anyone looking to build a truly permission-based email list.