When you take a prescription drug, that's between you, your doctor and your pharmacist. No one else has a right to know.

Perhaps not for much longer.

Under legislation that quietly passed in the California Senate on May 29 (bill SB 1096) and is making its way through the Assembly, drugstores would be free to share patients' prescription records with companies that specialize in bulk mailings.

The ostensible rationale for the data sharing is that it would help consumers by providing letters reminding people to take their medication or refill a prescription.

The reality, critics say, is that this is an effort by pharmaceutical companies to help ensure that patients stick with expensive name-brand drugs and not stray toward cheaper generic alternatives. It also could lead to privacy violations.

"Your private medical information is being transferred from one database to another", said Jerry Flanagan of Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. "Once that genie's out of the bottle, it's very hard to get it back in". The've also launched a campaign for fighting against this bill.

The creator of this Senate Bill says it has been misunderstood by the public, and particularly by journalists who failed to grasp its finer points. Contrary to some reports, he said, it wouldn't allow drug companies to send you pitches for their medicines in an attempt to get patients to switch from one brand to another.

Oh my! :-(

Read the rest of this tremendously intricate plot involving politics, drug makers, money and online privacy at David Lazarus' Consumer Confidential Blog (Los Angeles Times).

What's your opinion?

About a month ago I wrote a post about buying lists in the Internet and why this was a bad idea.

Today I received a question from one of our customers about renting a list and the convenience of doing this.

Rented lists are different from selling lists in that, in the first case, you don't get access to the data in the list but the provider sends your email on your behalf to its own list of recipients. You must trust a lot the provider or otherwise you can not be sure that the list has a good quality and the recipients have given permission for receiving this kind of e-mails.

Companies that grow lists for renting generally get their recipients from vertical portals or from some specific websites. Probably this people give permission to these portals to send them e-mail from them or their customers and partners, but think about the consequences of the owners of the list sending an e-mail on your behalf: The recipients will not know you and probably get annoyed and click the “report spam” button. And most important: they didn’t give you explicit permission to send them any e-mail.

Sounds this familiar to you?  Yes, it's the definition of spam: unsolicited e-mail.

Does this mean that this against the law? Not necessarily, but the point here, as always, is not only if it’s against the law (that’s supposed to be), but if it is against your own interests.

You will probably pay a good bunch of bucks for using the list, and you are surely getting a real low response for the emailing, and therefore a small ROI from the investment. And worse, your brand could be damaged if people think you’re a spammer. You don’t have a clue if the list is heavily used and consequently people in the list are angry about receiving your e-mail.

So the conclusion in (again) that you must not rent lists for emailing.

If you really need to grow your subscriptions’ list fast you can try to advertise in a vertical portal newsletter, co-brand it or make co-registration. But renting or buying a list is always a bad thing to do.

As always, I recommend that you grow your own in-house permission list (some tips here and here). It’s slow and painful, but it’s the only way to get results. In e-mail marketing always think in quality, not in quantity (more is less), and don’t forget that the most important asset you have is your brand and reputation, so don’t get a chance to drive it to a dead end.

In case you don’t want to hear my advice please review this interesting article by Jeanne Jennings: “Renting E-Mail Lists: What to Ask Before the Send”, and the ten rules of thumb for rented lists of Marketing Sherpa.

Last week, in an e-mail marketing training I taught, I was talking about permission e-mail marketing and what it implies, that's grow your own home list. One of the main concerns people had is that going this way it's going to take ages to grow a good list. And that's true: it is a hard and long-time task that deserves all your attention and care.

The first temptation everyone experiments is to google a little bit in order to find a way to buy a list from someone else. That's a very bad idea.

There are a lot of reasons for not doing that, but the main is that - ethics and law apart- for the same reason you can buy it, anyone else can buy it too. So, there is no control over who can send mail to the list and how many times. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, that's plain spam.

One typical list has an obsolescence rate that ranges from 15 to 30% in a year. That means that if the list you buy is one year old and it has 100.000 e-mails in it, you will probably get some 20.000 or more bounced mails when you use it. And probably it will be older and unusable.

Besides, these lists are normally made by e-mail spiders. These are special applications that sniff web pages in search of e-mail addresses. A lot of web pages have "honey pot" addresses. They are in the HTML code of the page, but they're not visible for the visitors, only to the e-mail spiders. When someone sends an e-mail to this "honey pots" the sender is added to a black list and is considered a spammer, because the only way that you may know this address is by using an illegal e-mail collector. So, if you use a list that, no doubt, will have several of this "honey pot" addresses you'll end up in a lot of black lists out there, damaging forever your reputation and your deliverability.

So the moral is: Grow your own permission list. It's hard and it takes time, but is a guarantee of quality, legitimacy and good practices. In this case less is more. Never ever buy or download an e-mail list. And if you do, please don't use MAILCast for your e-mailings :-(

I've always stressed the importance of a home grown list, done with care and tenacity.

The growing of this kind of list, as harder as it can get, must be done in the right way: one that complies with Law and that make our would-be subscribers confident about us and our brand.

One simple way used by many marketers for quickly growing a list is what is called opt-out subscription. With this method they simply gather e-mail addresses from anywhere (commercial trade shows, the Internet, every kind of contact they make...) and add them to their list. If the recipient it's not willing to receive more e-mail from you they have the option to unsubscribe anytime. Although this is a method accepted by many companies, it's not very advisable. Many people, angry or simply not recognizing your brand, will mark the e-mail as spam causing harm to your brand (and your send reputation). In fact this is a kind of unsolicited e-mail and you could be fairly considered a spammer, and in some countries (in Spain, for example) if you send more than three e-mails in one year to a recipient without consented permission you could face important fines. 

Another way to get someone subscribed to your list is single opt-in subscription. In this case the recipients go to your webpage and use a sing-up form to enter their e-mail address. Automatically they're added to your list and start sending your messages. This is a better approach but has a lot of potential problems:

· You're not ensuring that the e-mail address entered is correct. One single character mistyping is enough.

· You have no way to check that the person who is subscribing is the owner of the address. This can lead to very bad situations such as you contributing to "mail bombing" operations (someone get subscribed to many e-mail lists by other person).

· Your list can be poisoned by malicious competency or by a cracker just for fun. This consists on adding to your list several spam-trap e-mail addresses. When you send e-mail to them you could end up in several black-lists without even noticing. Very bad situation :-(
· False subscriptions of people who only want to get to your content but are not willing to give you a real address in exchange.

A variant of this method is called notified single opt-in. This is simply the same as the previous case but sending a notification e-mail to the new subscriber. If she doesn't want to receive your e-mail she can automatically unsubscribe by clicking on a link. This don't avoid many of the problems I've just spotted, so I don't recommend it either.

The best way to grow your list is by using double opt-in or confirmed opt-in. With this method your new subscribers don't get added to the list until they confirm their subscription clicking in a link in an immediate e-mail they receive. In this way you are sure that the address is correct and that the new subscriber is willing to receive your e-mails. This is the best way to go, although it is not without problems if you don't have the right tool to automate the process.

Fortunately MAILCast has built in capacities in order to customize your subscription process, letting you chose the exact way you want to go.

In a future post I'll show you how to automatically handle and customize the subscription and un-subscription process with MAILCast.

One barrier that many small companies have to confront when they consider starting a newsletter -or any other e-mail based strategy- is the lack of a good recipients' list.  "We have few customers" or "We don't have the e-mail addresses of our customers" are the main concerns they usually have.

Well, the fact that you don't have any e-mails is a problem. In fact it is a catch 22 problem: you don't start a mail strategy because you don't have a good list, and you don't maintain a good list because you are not using e-mail at all.

However, e-mail customer relationship, marketing, or customer retention need long-term strategies. So, the fact is that, if you don't start building your list right now you'll never have a list at all.

There are a lot of ways to proactively start growing a good e-mail list, and buying a database is not among them (they are very inaccurate and, in most cases, even illegal).

Ways to grow your list

Try to maintain a good (I mean: with a lot of added value) newsletter and promote it as hard as you can: in envelopes, business cards, brochures... and ask people to sign in or send you their e-mail in order for you to subscribe them.

Slowly but surely, make e-mail your main and natural way to communicate with customers. Just not use it for marketing or newsletters. Start sending your invoices by e-mail. Notify your customers by e-mail about product availability, order confirmations, product deliveries, and so on. This way they'll get used to receive e-mail from you, and will be more receptive to your information through this means.

Get as many e-mails as you can from your current customers. You can ask for their e-mails when you talk to them on the phone or in commercial visits. Ask for it in your paper-based communications too (ex.: invoices).

Ask for their e-mail to the visits that get into your facilities. For example, if you have a shop, inform the visitors about the existence of your newsletter or the value-added services you can offer them by e-mail (ex: product availability notifications, catalog updates...).

Of course, put a subscription box to your newsletter on your website. Make it easy to subscribe (but comply with law offering double opt-in, more on this on next posts). If you make it even easier to unsubscribe in case they don't want to keep receiving your mail, the will be less wary about subscribing in the first place.

Another fantastic way of getting a lot of e-mails at once is by arranging a contest or competition. A good place to start is in business events or conventions. If you have a stand there, collect names and e-mails from visitors and offer several prizes. They not have to be very costly, and can be your own products. Notify the visitors that they e-mails are going to be used only to send them your newsletter and that is very easy to unsubscribe if they're not interested later. You can arrange this kind of competitions in your shop or in your website. They are an effective way to grow your list of people interested in your products or services.

Once you start your strategy in a sustainable way your list will grow fast.

Today I've been working in a small (just 97 lines of code) Excel VBA macro that can be somewhat useful. This utility allows you to split up columns of data that contain Names and Surnames mixed, so that you get two new columns with this elements separated.

It is able to correctly split names in several formats:

• Name and Surname. (for example: Zachery Barr)
• Name Initial Surname. (Stewart H. Shepherd)
• Two Names and a Surname (José Manuel Alarcón)
• Two Names and several Surnames (José Manuel Alarcón Aguín)

Download Name and LastName Splitter.xls (54 KB)

In order to use it you must enable the support for macros everytime you open it in Excel:

Press "Options", and select the "Enable this content" option:

Now just copy and paste your mixed data in any column in any sheet of this spreadsheet.

It's important that you select the range of cells you need to be processed for splitting. If you don't make any selection only the current cell will be processed.

Now go to the "View" ribbon in Excel 2007 (or Tools·Macros in previous versions) and press the "Macros" button or press ALT+F8, as it's shown below:

In the dialog that appears execute the macro "SplitCurrentColumn":

Now you will get another sheet named "Split" with two columns. In the first one you'll have the names and in the second the Lastnames.

You can process as many data columns as you want but take into account that the "Split" sheet will be emptied each time you execute the macro, so save your new data first. You cannot process data in the "Split" sheet which holds the results.

In the download I've included a sheet with sample data for you to try (300 randomly generated names).

Hope this helps!

One of the most influent factors in your email marketing campaigns’ success is your database. Your subscribers’ list is your treasure. Your mailing´s effectiveness and sales conversion depends on your database, and not only that…as well your reputation.

What I mean is that if you don’t care about your database, then it may be a big number of your emails bouncing-back, and therefore the email service providers will include your IP in their “suspicious” lists of spammers, affecting to our reputation…and if this practice goes on and on, then we´ll end up in the serious black list. What means that our mailing campaigns will be never accepted by some email providers, even if our subscribers have given us permission and accepted to receive our communications.  How many people do you know who is checking their “Junk folder” daily, given that they actually receive hundreds of spam emails in their inbox? Hmm…great! So what can you do?

You should check, clean and update your database. How many times? As much as you can! This will depend on how often you send email campaigns. After every mailing, you should delete duplicated emails addresses, spelling mistakes in the domains, and don´t forget to analyze your soft and hard bouncing.

Check the reasons of your soft bounced-back emails.  Your subscribers may have changed their email account for many reasons. Try to get in touch with them and confirm their details and their interest on receiving your newsletters.

Delete your hard bounced-back emails. No fear let them go!! Because they will ruin your IP reputation and the effectiveness of your future email campaigns, let them go, no pain.