InfusionSoft terminated me wrongly, then publicly lied about the reasons! Gilbert Arizona

We take Jonathan's situation seriously and acknowledge his frustrations with the actions from our company. I'd like to clarify inaccuracies in Jonathan's statements and be transparent about our processes as they relate to his experience. In summary, we provided software and consulting, and later eventually terminated his service due to non-compliance to our Acceptable Use Policy.


Our small business marketing solution provides email marketing services, in addition to a host of additional features in one integrated solution including sales force automation, affiliate program management, customer relationship management, voice and fax broadcasting, e-commerce services and more. Email marketing is one important aspect of our service which attracts many new clients to our company. Likewise, it's an important asset to defend much like data integrity, data security and customer service.


As a company, we have a strong stance against abusive and illegal email marketing practices. We're proud to meet and exceed industry standards (MAAWG) and regulatory compliance (CAN-SPAM Act), etc. Our policies that manage our client's marketing practices are made clear in writing (Acceptable Use Policy, available at "http://www.infusionsoft.com/legal-stuff/aup") as clients begin their usage of our service and are frequently reminded of the expectations and guidelines of our service within our software.


Having that said, we would like to substantiate the reasons why we terminated services for Jonathan. Please forgive my verbosity, but I would like to make it undeniable to interested readers that we provided services as agreed for Jonathan and have upheld our end of the agreement reasonably based on Jonathan's email marketing practices.


Jonathan became a customer on 3/31/2008. We had a talented small business coach, Corey T., begin implementation of our software and services on 4/01/2008, and proceeded with daily interactions for Jonathan. We have confirmation that as of 4/14/2008, Jonathan successfully completed our implementation and was positioned to sell various products through our application's shopping cart. We have documentation supporting these interactions.


Between 4/15/2008 and 1/6/2009, we had four successful technical support interactions between Jonathan and members of our support team addressing the needs of "how do I" questions, for which we provide instant live support at no additional charge. During this period, it is reasonably assumed that our clients are successful with their implementation and usage of our software application especially considering that we provide specific marketing emails engaging with our clients, toll-free customer support and have an easy to use customer support self-service help portal.


The acceptable email marketing industry standard for ISP complaint rate is 0.1%. That is, 1 email out of 1000 can permissibly be reported as spam from e-mail recipients. Examples of this type of complaint from recipients include the Report Spam for AOL Mail, Spam button in Yahoo Mail or Junk button in Hotmail.
On 1/6/2009, we detected a very high ISP complaint rate for Jonathan's application due to a large mass mailing that was delivered to 54,233 recipients. Jonathan's complaint rate for his email was 4.02%. Effectively, 40.2 times the acceptable complaint rate for our clients. We immediately suspended email services per our Acceptable Use Policy and notified Jonathan via email and telephone. Additionally, his application was placed into heuristic review by our Email Compliance Team for investigation of malicious use.


Our review indicated Jonathan collected several thousand e-mail addresses through an opt-in Web Form, omitting disclosure as to what kind of email, frequency of email or permission to send commercial email to said recipients. The context for opting into Jonathan's marketing was a Free Blackberry according to the landing page. The email that was sent was a commercial email promoting a get rich quick offer, which is completely unrelated to the expectation of the recipients.


After a lengthy conversation between Jonathan and our team we concluded that Jonathan should no longer be permitted to do business with us per our Acceptable Use Policy. Specifically, we terminated services for the following reasons:

-- Blatant/Widespread Email Abuse: The only instance of this violation occurred with an unreasonably high amount of recipients (54K).
-- Questionable Practices: The method of the lead capture was well outside our best practices, unethical by nearly anyone's standards, and recipients validated this through their ISP spam complaints.
-- Unsubscribe Padding: The email Jonathan sent included 16 line breaks (new lines) between his last sentence in an effort to bury or hide the legally-mandated unsubscribe link that we require.
-- Questionable Email Content: The first three lines of the email, Jonathan includes the recipient's IP address, date of opt-in and email address. This tactic employed by many abusers who intend to defend the purpose of their e-mail.
-- Questionable Practices: The method of collecting his recipients gives rise to misleading email content (e.g., people expect a free item and receive get-rich-quick offers instead), which would violate regulations detailed in the CAN-SPAM Act.
-- Questionable Practices: Jonathan has demonstrated that his email marketing was unrelated, poorly targeted and was not aligned in any way to our best practices or consulting services provided.


In most cases, we offer clients a three-strike policy as it pertains to their relationship with our company (three anti-spam complaints, service is terminated). However, we assess a series of factors of our client's behavior such as the content of their email, the severity of the violation and likelihood of repeat occurrences. We perform a greater service to the millions of consumers and thousands of clients that we forcibly remove risks and liabilities such as Jonathan from our service. Our clients expect us to maintain superior email deliverability and healthy relationships with ISPs; to carry that out; we must terminate services to abusive clients, often regrettably.


Our initial email to Jonathan stated "Unsolicited Commercial Email," which was factually inaccurate; however, we followed up and clarified his termination was due to an excessive ISP spam complaint rate. My only statement (in error) was regarding Jonathan's willingness, which was a misunderstanding on my part. As a point of clarification, we are not willing to continue our relationship with Jonathan based on the results of his actions and behaviors demonstrated regarding his marketing practices.


Despite Jonathan's statement, we have provided the services for which he's paid. We've provided excellent small business coaching, as records indicated; we've provided email services and full-service application with zero complaints or refund requests.


We would like to point out that it was only until we enforced our Acceptable Use Policy, Jonathan requested a refund. We have engaged and communicated to Jonathan about the cause for his termination of services. We will not be honoring this refund request due to the availability of services, nature of his request and to uphold the guidelines stated in the Acceptable Use Policy.


We understand and apologize for the poor experience that Jonathan endured, and have made changes to our email abuse communications in favor of being more detailed and friendly, provide more frequent communications within our software about our Acceptable Use Policy and will be deploying an external program committed to educating our clients on proper email marketing practices.


I hope this provides readers with detailed perspective on this matter. If anyone has questions about our enforcement of the Acceptable Use Policy, they're invited to contact me my e-mail address is included below.



Regards,
Joseph Manna
joseph.manna ~at~ infusionsoft.com