Let’s Learn from Spammy Email Marketers— 1 Thing to NEVER do with your Chatbot
<Disclaimer>I am an email marketer at heart. I’ve been setting up email marketing tools for clients for 9 years. So, if any email marketers are reading this please don’t think I’m bashing on your trade. I love you!</Disclaimer>
This morning I learned a valuable lesson about spammy email marketing practices — one that I think applies to us as we build out our chatbots. Here is my story…
Today, at 10:02am MDT, I received an email from BPM Online, a company that creates a relatively good CRM and marketing automation tool. Until this morning I respected them as a company and thought highly of their tool.
One of their “Partner Development Managers” (appointment setters) has been sending me a lot of emails, and I wanted it to stop, so I opened the email with the intent to unsubscribe. Low and behold, there wasn’t an unsubscribe link.
This didn’t come as a great surprise to me.
A lot of email marketers don’t include an unsubscribe link.
Do I think that is okay?
No.
I have a personal policy, one that I think is best practice for most companies, that if you’re sending an automated email it needs to include the unsubscribe link.
What about automated emails that are supposed to look like they’ve come straight from a salesperson?
It doesn’t matter if it is an email with a pretty HTML wrapper that is obviously being sent by an automated process, or if it’s a text only email that is being sent, automagically, on behalf of a salesperson… emails that are sent by automated means should, generally, always have an unsubscribe link.
Here comes the boom
Okay, so I’ve been rambling about unsubscribe link best practice. You may or may not agree with my ramblings. However, I think everyone will agree with the rest of my story…
Because the email from BPM Online didn’t have an unsubscribe link in it, I went for the “report spam” option in Gmail.
If there is not an unsubscribe link in the email, when you click this button you should get a little message that confirms you want to report spam and send the message to the spam box.
This time, though, when I clicked the button Gmail gave me the option to report spam and unsubscribe via the link in the email.
What was Gmail thinking!? There was no unsubscribe link in the email!
Or was there?
Back in the wild, wild west days of SEO marketers would hide links in the footer of a website by making the link font the same color as the background. I thought to myself “maybe BPM Online is hiding the unsubscribe link in their email!”
So, I hovered all over the email and sure enough, my cursor changed to a little clicky hand.
They hid their unsubscribe link with white font!
I’m not sure if it was the salesperson himself, one of his sales leaders, or a marketer (likely the later), but some shifty individual at BPM Online decided to hide the unsubscribe link in white text at the bottom of the email.
So, what’s wrong with this?
There are a LOT of reasons why it is bad that BPM Online hid their unsubscribe link:
- It comes across as unethical to their email recipients
- It makes Gmail and other email clients think the email is above board, when in reality it isn’t. Email clients want automated emails to have an unsubscribe link, and likely have measures in their algorithm to increase the deliverability of emails that have an unsubscribe link. If you hide the link though then you’re gaming the algorithm… which may suit you well in the short term. However, once Gmail or any other email client figures out what you’re doing they’ll change their algorithm to detect hidden text, and likely even blacklist your domain. Ouch… that will hurt!
- You’re breaking your legal agreement with your email sending provider. Most email sending providers require that you have an unsubscribe link in your automated emails. They are trying to keep the world of email marketing honest so that legislators won’t pass laws against email marketing that ultimately hurt their company (and yours!). The funny thing here is that BPM Online is an email sending provider — and this email likely violates its own legal agreement!
- You’re making the world a crappy place. Okay, maybe I’m going a little over the top here. However, if all email marketers degrade themselves to using tactics like this then what will that mean for the world of email marketers? Doom and destruction. :)
- Lots of other reasons… but I’m just rambling again and I want to tie this back to ethics in building Chatbots!
In case you’d like to get more nitty-gritty details on how BPM Online pulled off this devious stunt, here’s a short video I put together explaining it all:
How does this apply to Chatbots?
Last week I gave a training to the Social Media Marketing Society about how to build a chatbot. One question that an attendee asked was “should we disclose that our chatbot is actually a bot, and not a human?”
Chatbots are a relatively new marketing tool… good solutions for building chatbots have only been around for less than a year. Because they are so new most consumers tend to be surprised by their initial interactions — and many of them wonder if they’re chatting with a real human or a bot. That is, until they ask a question and the bot gives the default answer, which usually indicates it is a bot.
Some marketers have grandiose dreams that they can build a chatbot that is so smart that it’ll pass a Turing test: people will interact with the bot and not be able to differentiate it from a human conversation.
These marketers fail though. And they’ll continue to fail unless they are working for the largest organizations in the world and have enormous budgets to spend on artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Until the tech improves, and until you have templates you can easily import into your chatbot, it is going to be tough, if not impossible, to make your bot appear truly human.
Instead, have some fun! Make it clear that your bot is a bot.
If you’re upfront about it, your prospective customers will think your organization is awesome to be on the cutting edge. They’ll be impressed that you have created your own chatbot!
