Develop Responsible E-mail Campaigns

Few catalogers would dispute that e-mail marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods for communicating with customers. And in this day and age, it’s also one of the most hotly contested. Indeed, the e-mail channel is fraught with legal, technical and marketing challenges.

This article provides suggestions for keeping your e-mail program legal and ethical, and it offers tips on increasing the chances that your e-mails make it to your customers.

The Can Spam Act and You

In December, President Bush signed the legislation known as “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Market-ing Act of 2003” or Can Spam. The law, which went into effect Jan. 1, prohibits:

- false e-mail headers,

- deceptive subject lines,

- harvesting e-mail addresses via automatic or improper means (e.g., e-mail addresses listed on Web sites, “dictionary attacks”), and

- sending e-mails through open relays.

The law also mandates that commercial e-mails contain:

- a functioning return e-mail address that enables recipients to opt-out of future e-mails from the sender (sources listed in “For More Info” on pg. 38 can offer more specifics on this particular provision);

- the postal address of the sender (a P.O. box or mail drop won’t do); and

- an indication the message is an advertisement (as yet, there’s no requirement to use the word “Adv” or some derivative of it, although there may be in the future). For recipients who’ve opted in to get your e-mails, you need not denote the messages are commercial in nature.

The Act also requires compliance with certain marketing practices aimed at wireless e-mail accounts. And Congress has mandated that the Federal Trade Commission study the implications of a do-not-e-mail registry similar to the Do-Not-Call Registry.

As The Direct Marketing Association notes in its white paper on the Can Spam Act: “These requirements on commercial e-mail [do] not apply to ‘transactional or relationship’ e-mail messages, such as e-mails about account balances, memberships, subscriptions or other ongoing commercial relationships that are not primarily solicitations.” (To get a copy of the white paper, see “For More Info,” below.)

Consumers can’t sue spammers, but ISPs (e.g., AOL, MSN, Yahoo!) can sue those using fraudulent techniques. Additionally, the Act allows for fines and jail time for violators.

As noted, the law may do relatively little to stop spam altogether, because it doesn’t ban spam outright. To repeat: Can Spam does not prohibit e-mailing individuals without their prior consent. But you must comply with specific provisions regarding notification and what’s included in the messages.

What does Can Spam mean to legitimate e-mail marketers? It offers welcome relief on two fronts. First, the Act preempts a patchwork of 37 inconsistent state e-mail laws, simplifying compliance. Second, the law offers no provision for individuals to sue mailers, thus reducing risk for legitimate e-mailers.

Although Can Spam doesn’t prohibit unsolicited commercial e-mail, current best practices suggest catalogers must hold themselves to a higher standard. Legitimate e-mailers never send unsolicited e-mail. Period. Indeed, leading catalogers eschew e-mailing anyone who hasn’t directly requested to get that cataloger’s e-mails. That means no e-mail swaps and no e-mail rentals.

Take-away tips:

- Only e-mail those who’ve requested your messages.

- Never use deceptive subject lines.

- Include clear opt-out provisions.

- Never fake e-mail headers.

- Include your postal address.

- And sleep a little sounder at night, knowing that while Can Spam won’t reduce spam in your own inbox, it does lessen the legal risk to your company.

Get Delivered, or How to Avoid ISP Filters

Consider this scenario: You work for a catalog that follows best practices for e-mail marketing. Your e-mail list is 100-percent opt-in. Your marketing messages are never deceptive. All of your messages include clear opt-out instructions, and opt-out requests are honored promptly. Your customers asked you to send them e-mails, because they find your messages interesting, and at appropriate intervals you send them the information they asked to receive. In short, you consider yourself a “white-hat” e-mail marketer — the antithesis of a spammer.

Imagine your frustration, then, when large portions of your campaigns routinely are discarded as spam by software filters running on ISPs and your customers’ computers. If you aren’t a spammer, why aren’t your campaigns getting delivered?

This deliverability conundrum vexes all legitimate e-mail marketers. A recent Jupiter Research study found deliverability to be the top concern of e-mail marketers, with 31 percent of those surveyed citing ISP blacklists and corporate filters as their greatest worry. In contrast, only 8 percent of marketers surveyed cited anti-spam legislation as their biggest concern.

We all know the Internet is drowning in spam. No doubt your own inbox overflows with pitches for herbal Viagra, septic tank cleansers and Nigerian bank scams. The Can Spam bill estimated 50 percent of all e-mail sent today is spam. Last June, Microsoft put the figure at 80 percent.

To combat this flood, ISPs and consumers have installed filters to identify and discard spam. These software programs use various techniques to tag it, including: black lists of IP addresses of known spammers, keyword lists of spam terms, collaborative filtering and more. While intended to stop spam, these filters also routinely toss requested commercial e-mail. How frequently? It’s hard to tell. Of six major catalogers interviewed for this article, all admitted they were unable to determine the fraction of their campaigns lost to the filters, and none were willing to speak on the record.

Keith Wardell, CEO of the e-mail services bureau Exmplar, suggests that a routine mailing to a clean opt-in list typically might lose 10 percent to 20 percent of the circulation to blocks and filters. Wardell warned this rate can soar to more than 50 percent if the campaign triggers a spam filter at a major ISP such as AOL, Yahoo! or MSN.

In earlier times, ISPs provided bounce messages to mailers when filters tripped. Today, ISPs route the suspect mail into bulk folders or discard it outright without offering feedback to the mailer.

Following are three methods to determine if your e-mails are reaching your customers:

1. Seed accounts. E-mail seed accounts are the online equivalent of postal mail decoys. Catalogers add a handful of e-mail addresses they control to each campaign. The seeds are sent randomly throughout the mailing, and the mailer monitors these accounts to determine if the message makes it to the inbox.

Most of the seeds should be in the AOL, MSN and Yahoo! domains. The list also should include some seeds behind corporate firewalls, and in the .org, .gov and .edu top-level domains.

Obtaining, mailing and monitoring seeds can be inconvenient and laborious. While traditional postal mail-monitoring firms are planning to offer e-mail deliverability tracking, currently there are no established stand-alone vendors providing such a service. So you must develop e-mail decoy programs internally, or rely on your e-mail service bureau for seed tracking.

2. Communicate with the ISPs. All of the major e-mail service bureaus, and even some larger mailers themselves, develop direct relationships with technical liaisons within the large ISPs. These relationships are essential to high-volume mailers. Of course, the personal approach is difficult for smaller catalogers who execute their e-mail campaigns in-house. Knowing whom to call at each ISP, getting through to that person, and being trusted by him or her can take considerable time and effort on your part.

3. Look for inferences from other mail metrics. Most mailers use secondary metrics to monitor deliverability. E-mail that isn’t delivered is, of course, never opened or clicked. If your open rates, click rates and opt-out rates plummet, you may infer that large portions of your campaign were blocked.

However, using proxy metrics to estimate deliverability is an imprecise practice; e-mail metrics notoriously vary from campaign to campaign. And relying on secondary metrics to estimate deliverability reveals potential problems too late to do anything about them.

Four Steps to Increase Your E-mail Deliverability

1. Determine how much of your mail gets delivered. Review your deliverability tracking with your e-mail vendor, or establish a tracking program in-house. Establish seed accounts at the major ISPs to determine if your mail reaches those inboxes. Install popular spam-blocking software on these seed accounts to determine if common spam-detectors route your campaigns to the trash.

2. Mail only 100-percent, opt-in, fresh housefile e-mail addresses. Nowadays, think hard before renting third-party consumer e-mail lists, swapping e-mail lists and appending e-mails to your postal file.

3. Avoid mailing stale addresses. Contact your e-mail housefile at least monthly. Customers routinely discard free e-mail accounts, and ISPs suspend such accounts after several months of inactivity. Some ISPs recycle suspended accounts into their spam-detection programs. E-mail into those inactive accounts, then, may suggest to the ISPs that the mailer is spamming. Bulk e-mailing customers to whom you last sent commercial e-mail more than 10 months ago could lead some ISPs to block your entire mailing.

4. Ensure your e-mails don’t resemble spam. To avoid tripping front-end or back-end filters, avoid spam-like copy in your headline and e-mail body copy. Words such as “free,” “money” and “Viagra,” and using excessive or irregular punctuation generally are considered tipoffs to spam. To review recently sent spam from across the Internet, check out http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=news.admin.net-abuse.sightings

E-mail Service Bureaus

Given the complexity of today’s e-mail issues, you probably want to simplify your marketing by using an e-mail service bureau. Should you use an external vendor to send campaigns or handle e-mail in-house?

To be sure, the decision process can be complicated. Smaller marketers with e-mail files of less than 100,000 names often use basic off-the-shelf tools and send e-mail themselves. Because of smaller quantities, slower mailing velocities and modest marketing budgets, internal solutions make sense for smaller mailers.

But catalogers with larger files typically outsource e-mail delivery. The cost of actually pushing out e-mail is near zero. A good e-mail service bureau offers value through its expertise in deliverability, account management, marketing strategy, test execution and segmentation.

There’s a growing trend among the largest e-mail marketers to bring their e-mail delivery back in-house. As this requires investment in software and dedicated resources, this option makes sense for mailers spending more than $75,000 annually in e-mail service bureau fees.

Conclusion

For legitimate e-mail marketers, Can Spam offers welcome relief from much of the legal risk during the last few years. However, in the long run, legitimate e-mailers should hold themselves to much higher standards than Can Spam requires. Indeed, best practices dictate sending mail only to 100-percent, opt-in housefile names.

While the legal concern has lessened, deliverability concerns have increased. ISPs are blocking more and more e-mail, and many requested marketing communications to opt-in names are being discarded as spam. Whether internally or externally, track if your e-mail reaches your customers as intended, and work with your service bureau, ISPs and copywriters to increase the odds that your e-mails are delivered.

For More Info

For a copy of the Can Spam Act, visit: www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html. A PDF version also is available for download from the site.

The Direct Marketing Association offers its members the white paper “The DMA’s Analysis of Can Spam Act of 2003.” The paper offers a succinct look at the law’s major provisions. Contact (212) 790-1500 or visit: www.the-dma.org

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., is president of the Rimm-Kaufman Group LLC. Vist him on the Web at www.rimmkaufman.com