Verifying Email Addresses and Protecting PDFs You Send
Quality of email address generation. Direct mail – what’s working. Protection against subscribers illegally passing on pdf files. Royalties from the Copyright Clearance Center. These are the subjects from conversations on the SIPA Listserv just from last week. It really is one of the best member benefits that SIPA has, especially when it gets a head of steam going.
The most active forums are Marketing, IT and Editorial. The above subjects came from the Marketing listserv. Jennifer Kern of Modern Distribution Management asked about the quality of email addresses generated from conversions on AdWords campaigns (as opposed to leads generated directly from sign-up forms on your websites). “Two of our recent campaigns have been very successful at generating conversions (email addresses) but the domains are primarily Yahoo and Hotmail accounts,” she wrote.
Andy Tarczon, the founding partner of The Diffusion Group (TDG), gave a very thoughtful response: “I know your pain. We’ve been using Pardot’s Prospect Insight for lead gen/drip marketing functions. It also gives us micro-level details on individual users and their specific activities and is used in conjunction with Google Analytics macro analytics. We’ve tested within Pardot’s options to accept all email domains or filter out the free domains (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., get bounced). Not surprisingly, we saw a dramatic decrease in both sign-ups and downloads when filtering takes place. We’ve made the decision to open it back up to all.
“This type of filtering isn’t an option for many platforms—i.e. gotowebinar, etc. For some of that content, we’ve made it a requirement to provide a corporate email address. Non-compliance means the address is rejected via a manual approval process (tedious = yes). I can’t speak specifically to AdWords correlation to junk email but am definitely observing the overall trend to protect inboxes.”
Added Dale Debber of Providence Publications: “We have been on both sides of this decision on the free email addresses for several of our products. On one of them we actually do go through a manual check if the address is a free one, other we don’t.”
On the issue of protecting yourself from subscribers who might illegally pass on pdf files, Francesco Catanzaro of Capitol Information Group wrote: “In my opinion many copy protection schemes will simply make the PDF less usable and make more of a hassle to subscribers. For one thing, FileOpen does not have an iPhone/iPad version that I know aside from requiring custom plug-ins and registrations, etc. Other javascript-based schemes don’t always work or raise ‘virus’ or security warnings in users’ machines.
“Starting with the assumption that most sharing/forwarding of PDFs is not malicious theft and is simply a liberal interpretation of ownership, why not use the ‘shame’ method to keep people in compliance?” Catanzaro suggested. “Rather than taking the simple ‘disclaimer’ in the email approach, the solution can be a bit more technical so that the PDF gets watermarked for that subscriber in a very obvious way. Page 1 of the PDF could be a simple disclaimer page: ‘This PDF is licensed to XXXXX; any other use is PROHIBITED. Click here to report abuse’ Seems complex but the solution is very simple and can be achieved at a cost much less than solutions like FileOpen, especially in the long run since it would be a one-time expense. It does not prevent the person from forwarding or the receiver from reading the PDF, but I think this kind of deterrent can be effective especially when people would effectively be broadcasting, ‘Hey, I’m stealing’ to whomever they send this to.”
Ira Mayer of EPM Communications, Inc., said that they’ve been using Read/Notify for years and often follow up with people who “routinely forward,” to try to upsell them to group subscriptions—or in some cases “pursue legal remedies.” He added that, “when a subscriber requests changing from print to PDF, we ask them to sign an agreement stipulating that they won’t be forwarding it and acknowledging the copyright. Tom Curley at Levine Sullivan helped us with the wording, and we do in fact often have signed agreements with the people we find forwarding (who nonetheless claim they didn’t know they can’t do that…).”
That is great advice—and remember that SIPA members also get two free hours of legal advice from the firm of Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz.
Have a question you need answered? Go on the SIPA Listserv today!
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