When Reveries surveyed its readers about SPAM and its effects on the future of permission e-mail marketing, the response was overwhelming. A total of 525 marketers took the survey -- one of the magazine's largest responses ever.
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One can only imagine how many more might have responded if SPAM filters, ISP blocking or other email network roadblocks didn't mistakenly trash the email inviting their participation in the survey. In fact, about 20 percent of legitimate permission-based email never reaches the intended recipient's inbox. Worse, most recipients don't have a clue about their undelivered mail.
A healthy percentage (45 percent) of survey respondents said they viewed SPAM as a "big" or "huge" problem. No real surprise there. However, as to whether email is broken for permission-based marketing, a similarly hefty 42 percent said "no." Only 17 percent said "yes"; and 30 percent said "maybe." (for complete survey results, click here).
The only safe assumption is that most of the respondents, although seasoned marketing professionals, have not had much experience with the vagaries of running permission-based, email marketing campaigns.
Naturally, the permission email marketing industry does not promote the general unreliability of email delivery. Only front-line experience reveals the dark underbelly and maze of roadblocks that legitimate campaigns must navigate through to reach their audiences. Today, there really is no good reason for the industry to educate the population about the pitfalls of email – email marketing still returns the highest ROI of any direct marketing medium and business is good for providers and clients alike.
But tomorrow is another story. Despite all of the legislation, technology tweaking and white-knight solutions being touted about, permission email delivery issues continue to proliferate to such an extent that even the father of permission marketing, Seth Godin, suggests that "email marketing may be breathing its last."
At the risk of being "blacklisted" by my fellow email marketing service agencies, the following may be the first time that an accurate list of permission email shortcomings has appeared in print and been made available to all who care to read it. I will also happily share our vision for next generation permission communications.
Okay, we all know about SPAM and inbox clutter and how many of our messages get lost in the muck or mistakenly diverted by SPAM filters to junk folders, which we never cull through. Here are eleven more roadblocks that combine to handicap permission email communications:
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- Blocking. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) block incoming mail from Internet addresses (IP addresses) that they suspect may be coming from a SPAM source. Blocking is an imperfect science as evidenced clearly by the growing volume of SPAM in your inbox. Legitimate permission email is very frequently blocked, yet those pharmaceutical, body-part enhancement -- and various other offensive offers -- seem to fly right through the passing lane.
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- Blacklisting. Hundreds of independent anti-spam organizations have sprung up to help stem the flow of SPAM. They "blacklist" suspected IP addresses (the address of the sending mail server) based on their own arbitrary algorithms, research, SPAM reports and other secret ingredients. ISPs and corporations subscribe to their choice of blacklists and will automatically block email from any listed IP address. While blacklists do indeed snag a lot of bona fide spammers, legitimate permission marketers frequently get mistakenly blacklisted.
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- Creative Limitations. Remember those top ten marketing phrases we rang the register with for so many years? Don't use them in your email campaigns. SPAM filters score most of them quite highly. And watch out for too many caps in your copy or too many images, and even the font color blue, along with countless other creative tweaks that will attract suspicion and route your email to the junk can. Your copywriter may need some v*i*c*o*d*i*n after spam-proofing your campaign.
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- Image, Link and HTML Stripping. Intended to thwart users from being exposed to offensive images and dangerous links, many corporations choose to strip out all images and links from incoming mail. In fact, some organizations choose to reduce all HTML messages to plain text. In either case, the recipient is treated to a censored version of your message. What you see is not what your audience may get.
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- Email Reader Compatibility. In sharp contrast to the almost universal compatibility of the two major web browsers, there is a vast array of email readers to choose from. Each reader has its own characteristics and displays messages differently, making it almost impossible for a permission marketer to craft a consistent presentation for its entire subscriber base. Try optimizing your campaign for 17 different email readers and you may need to borrow a pill or two from your copywriter as well.
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- Rich Media Integration. What's the fastest growing, most effective marketing enhancement in the online world? Well, forget about using rich media in your email campaigns. Square peg, round hole. Broadband is proliferating, bandwidth is cheap and even the least expensive computers are rich media friendly today, but try to integrate rich media into your email campaigns and you'll open a Pandora's Box of delivery and compatibility issues.
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- Abuse Management. No matter how concrete the permission agreement may be with a subscriber, SPAM is in the eye of the beholder. Recipients can report any email they receive as SPAM to their ISP and various SPAM reporting organizations. More often than not, the sender is immediately blacklisted and blocked, usually without notice. Guilty until proven innocent. Permission marketers and service providers invest heavily in "abuse management" administration defending themselves from false SPAM reports and keeping their IP addresses on ISP's "white lists." One relatively new and quite successful "sender verification" service offers permission marketers a go-to-the-front-of the-line pass in exchange for a fee. Can you spell RICO?
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- Bounced Mail. When an email is not accepted for delivery, the recipient's mail server returns a bounce message to the sending server explaining why the email address was not deliverable so that the sender can remedy the problem (bad email address, full inbox, server issue, etc.). Great concept, but the accuracy of these bounce logs aren't worth the bits and bytes that they're written on and thus cannot be accepted at face value. Senders must resend to "bounced" addresses several times to achieve maximum delivery. Pretty efficient, huh?
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- Best-Guess Reporting. Permission marketers rely heavily on tracking and reporting to measure the performance of their campaigns. Deliveries, bounces, opens and clicks are the key metrics. "Deliveries" are calculated by subtracting bounced messages from the total sent, but no one knows if the message actually reached the inbox. "Opens" are tracked by little pixels in HTML messages, but theses pixels are often stripped or otherwise blocked. Text message "opens" cannot be tracked. And for the reasons stated in the previous paragraph, tracking legitimate "bounced" email is anybody's guess.
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- Delivery Delays. The process of sending and delivering email campaigns is pitted with delays from start to finish. Mail servers have varying degrees of throughput and max output. Permission marketers using shared mail server farms often wait in queue or fight for processing power when a campaign is launched. Once sent, each individual email must travel across the frequently congested Internet and make its way to the recipient's ISP who in turn, must process and then deliver the email. Large campaigns can take hours to deliver, sucking the wind right out of time-sensitive communications.
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- Anti-Spam Compliance. As government continues to introduce new legislation and ISPs tighten up their Acceptable Use Policies to eradicate SPAM, legitimate permission marketers will struggle thorugh the growing email network bureaucracy to get their campaigns delivered. Did you know that the volume of SPAM has almost doubled since the CAN-SPAM Act?
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So there you have it -- everything you didn't want to know about permission email. Solutions for two-way personal and corporate communications are well underway with new "white-listing" and verification technologies. Unfortunately, these solutions do not address all of the issues that concern permission marketers -- and perhaps rightfully so, as email's primary purpose really isn't about marketing communications.
Permission marketers and service providers are fighting the fight with vigor and passion, but the writing's on the wall -- permission email is very broken and there's little hope for a fix in the near or distant future.
So what to do about permission communications? Design a new delivery methodology specifically for one-way permission communications such as newsletters, promotions, offers and the like. Establish indisputable permission arrangements between senders and subscribers, put users back in the driver's seat with inviolate control over their subscription preferences and give permission marketers the tools they need to produce, manage and accurately track their campaigns without third-party interference and with full creative control.
We're actually in beta now with such a solution. We call it BrowserMail (personalized communications are delivered to a subscriber's browser). So far, BrowserMail's 2,000 beta users are giving high marks to their experience, and response metrics are three times greater than their previous email response rates. If you would like to know more, please visit: www.browsermail.com.
Well, gotta go … big opportunity just came in by email from Nigeria and rushing to the bank now.
Brad Wendkos is founder of TrueFire, providers of MailDog and BrowserMail, next-generation messaging solutions for permission and enterprise communications. He can be reached at: brad@truefire.com
