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MySpace, Take a Note - Some email marketing advice
October 2nd, 2008 by Adam Covati
Here’s a harsh reminder to MySpace, and probably many others out there, that you need to review your subscribe and unsubscribe processes. Today I received an email from MySpace.com. It looks like they’ve cleaned up their newsletter a bit so it shows something with images off — great news.
Of course the downside is that it’s been over a year since they emailed me. Definitely a bad move, just ask DJ.
So I scrolled to the bottom, and it looks like pretty clear messaging on how to remove yourself from this mailing. I’m actually encouraged by the fact that they offer a link to a preference center. It’s always in your best interest to offer a way to manage preferences and update info over just having a link for people to unsubscribe themselves. So I decided to check out their preference center, and I clicked the link.
I was greeted with MySpace’s homepage. No preferences page. No unsubscribe link. Just MySpace.com.
Naughty naughty, MySpace! The new CAN-SPAM amendments from earlier this year explicitly require no log in (or payment!) for removal from a newsletter. That’s why most ESPs, like Bronto, have been offering easy to use one or two-click unsubscribe systems with preference centers for years.
It looks like MySpace might be doing their email marketing entirely in-house. If they had a good ESP working with them on this then it would have been caught right away. As it stands, MySpace could potentially be sued for a violation of CAN-SPAM. That’s not a ‘Space’ I want to be in.
Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto
Posted in Best Practices |
Tagged With: CAN-SPAM • CAN-SPAM compliance • Email Marketing Best Practices • email preference center • email unsubscribe • email unsubscribe link
One has to wonder where privacy@myspace.com goes?
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Good point, I imagine you could try to unsubscribe from there, but from the amount of email and spam a generic address like that gets, I doubt there is good monitoring of it. Let’s find out — *sends email to privacy(a)myspace.com**. I’ll post a response here if I hear back.
- Adam
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Got a pretty quick auto-response from the privacy email address, apparently it forwards to help. Since I mentioned they didn’t have a proper unsubscribe link they sent me a bunch of help for uploading, removing, subscribing, and unsubscribing from videos. Great. Thanks Guys.
It was also followed by an avalanche of long, ugly urls for all the new myspace features. ugh.
-Adam
[...] Adam Covati added an interesting post on MySpace, Take a Note - How to send CAN-SPAM compliant emails …Here’s a small excerptMySpace.com’s email marketing practices leave much to be desired. Sending to old lists and inadequate unsubscribe capabilities leave them in sore need of some help from email marketing pros. [...]