As an email marketer you are responsible to ensure that any ‘electronic messages’ sent are not considered spam. According to the act, failure to comply could mean a fine of up to $500,000 plus additional compensation and damages costs!

So, what is considered to be an electronic message?

Any commercial message either sent in single or bulk, promoting goods, services, land and commercial website links in the following media types:

• Emails
• Instant Messaging
• SMS
• Multimedia Message Services
• Other Mobile Phone Messaging

Even if your company website link is present in an email signature of a personal message it would be deemed as a commercial message.

3 Steps To Comply

Step 1: Consent

You are only able to send messages when you have obtained at least one of three following consent types:

• Expressed Consent: a direct indication from a person stating that it is okay for you to send messages through filling in a paper form, ticking a box on a website form or phone or face-to-face conversation. It is advised that a record of such consent received is recorded in all instances. This is called “provable permission”.
• Inferred Consent: is limited in its application. It is when a person has not directly instructed you to send them a message, but there is a clear expectation that you will. E.g. a subscriber has provided their electronic address when purchasing goods and services and expects ‘highly relevant’ follow-up communication.
  This does not mean however consent is inferred if a person has been on an existing address list and has not physically unsubscribed themselves. If you are unsure of the type of consent received, it is recommended to undertake a “re-permissioning” campaign.
• Deemed Consent: is when a person makes their work-related electronic address public such as on a website, brochure or magazine. You can only send messages if there is a strong relationship between the message and the recipient’s business. However, consent is not deemed if the publication states that the person does not wish to receive unsolicited commercial electronic messages at that address.

Step 2: Identify

Your business must be clearly identified within the message. Both the name and contact details must be provided so that recipients know how to contact you.

Step 3: Unsubscribe

A clearly presented and easy to use functioning unsubscribe facility must be made available from all commercial messages. As part of a “provable permission” practice, it is recommended that unsubscribes are also recorded.

FAQs

What is considered spam?

A message is considered to be spam if it is electronic, commercial in nature and unsolicited (meaning you have not gained any form of consent from the recipient you send messages to).

What media is affected by the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007?

Media such as emails, instant messaging, SMS, multimedia message services and other mobile phone messaging are affected by this act. The act does not include however voice or fax.

What does a commercial message actually mean?

A commercial message is one that is marketing or promoting goods, services or land or directing people to a destination where a commercial transaction can take place. Even if you display a website link in a personal email, the message can still be classified as commercial.

Which messages are not deemed to be commercial?

• Responses to a request for a quote or estimate
• Messages that facilitate, complete or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient previously agreed to
• Warranty information, product recalls and safety and security information about goods or services uses or purchased by the recipient
• Factual information about a subscription, membership, account, loan or similar ongoing relationship
• Information directly related to employment or a related benefit plan in which the recipient is currently involved.
• Messages delivering goods and services, including product or upgrades that the recipient is entitled to receive under the terms of a previous transaction.

Am I able to insert promotional messages into transactional type messages?

If the main purpose of the message is transactional in nature, small relevant commercial messages can be displayed without requiring additional consent.

What do unsolicited messages mean?

These are messages that are sent without the expressed, inferred or deemed consent from individuals.

Do I need to ask for permission from all my subscribers again?

If you are unsure of the type of permission that you have received from your subscribers and the consent has not been recorded you will need to undertake a “re-permission campaign”, unless one of other forms of consent apply.

What are the penalties for not complying with the act?

There are a number of options available to enforce the legislation including formal warnings, infringement notices and court actions. If a business is to be found in breach of the act, it may have to pay a penalty of up to $500,000 plus and additional victim compensation and/or damages up to the value of the profit generated as a result of sending spam.

What are the 3 levels of consent?

Consent is categorized into 3 levels: Express, Inferred and Deemed.

What is Express Consent?

Express Consent is granted when a person directly indicates that you are able to send them commercial messages such as filling in a paper form, ticking a box on a website or a phone or face-to-face conversation.

Do I need to record consent received?

It is advised to record granted consent either electronically or in paper form. Under the act, it is up to the sender that consent has been received. It is quite easy for people to forget that they have granted permission, therefore it is necessary to record when, how and what people have given consent to receive.

What is provable permission?

Provable permission is where you have electronically recorded consent received. Details recorded can include:

• Date and time of permission granted
• Place of where permission was granted (a website form check box, trade show, call centre, etc)
• Type of information that permission was granted for

What is Inferred Consent?

Even though a person has not directly provided consent for you to send them messages, there is a reasonable expectation that messages will be sent. Inferred Consent is granted if you swap business cards with people or if you provided an email address when purchasing goods and services with an expectation that there will be follow-up communication.

Even if a person has been on your existing address list and has not unsubscribed, it does not mean that consent can be inferred.

As a business owner you need to be careful of what “reasonable expectation” means. If a person purchases a product from you and provides their email address, does not necessarily mean that you can send a message 2 years after the purchase date for example. Permission does eventually expire if after an amount of time, it is no longer reasonably expected that communication will be sent.

If I have received “inferred consent”, can I send any information that I want?

No, you are only able to send messages that are highly relevant to the relationship in which you have with the recipient.

What is Deemed Consent?

Deemed Consent is where a person makes their “work related” electronic address publicly available in a website, brochure or magazine for example. However, consent cannot be deemed if there is a statement within the publication requesting that the person does not want to receive unsolicited electronic messages at that address.

Deemed Consent can only be granted if the message you intend to send is highly relevant to the recipient’s business.

Do only messages sent in bulk apply to the act?

No, both bulk and single commercial messages are covered by the act.

Do we need to identify who is sending the message?

Yes, you must always identify your business as the organisation responsible for sending commercial messages along with details of how you can be contacted.

We use GravityMail or another 3rd party system to send our commercial messages, so who is legally responsible for sending these messages?

Even when you use a third party system such as Netconcept’s GravityMail, your business is the legal sender of your commercial messages. Netconcepts must work with you to ensure that your business name and contact details are displayed within the message. Your contact details must be accurate for at least 30 days after the send date.

How do we fit all of our information onto a text message?

Even text messages need to include your business name and a way for people to contact you whether this is a phone number, email address, website address, etc.

What methods of “unsubscription” are allowed for within the act?

Recipients of commercial messages must be able to unsubscribe from your mailing list when they choose to at no cost to them. Both automated and manual unsubscribe functions are allowed for within the act, but they must be reliable. These include:

• An automated unsubscribe link – a one-step-click link that can be clicked upon that automatically unsubscribes the recipient from receiving further communications. No further action is required.
• An automated unsubscribe reply – a person can reply to the message with the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” written in the subject line. Your system automatically unsubscribes that user.
• A manual unsubscribe reply – a person can reply to the message with the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” written in the subject line or within the body of the message stating they wish to be unsubscribed. You must honour this request within 5 working days or subsequent messages will be regarded as unsolicited.

Can I hide the unsubscribe function at the bottom of my commercial message?

No, the unsubscribe function must be clearly presented and easy to use within the commercial message.

What other laws are connected with sending commercial electronic messages?

In addition to the “Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007”, you must also comply with the Privacy Act 1993 which covers 12 Privacy Principals. Passing on personal electronic addresses to another organisation or business, without permission, may breach the Privacy Act.

The Privacy Act also states that you must allow individuals on your database to be able to review and modify their information upon request without any cost to them.

What are the 12 Privacy Principals?

1. You can only collect personal information that is relevant to your business.
2. Personal information can only be collected directly from the individual except when the information is publicly available or you are authorised by the individual to collect it.
3. You must make the individual aware of the following:
   • That information is being collected
   • The purpose in which the information is being collected
   • Who is going to receive the information
   • Name and Address of the organization collecting and holding the information
   • The individual’s right to access and correct any information
4. Information shall not be collected by unlawful or unfair means and shall not intrude to an unreasonable extent upon the personal affairs of the individual.
5. Information must be protected against loss, unauthorised access, misuse and modification. Every organisation who holds personal information must appoint a Privacy Officer who will be responsible for compliance.
6. Individuals are entitled to obtain from organizations confirmation of whether or not personal information is held and to access the information about themselves. You should establish, document and implement procedures to handle enquiries from individuals and to provide information requested.
7. Individuals have the right to request correction of their personal information.
8. The agency holding personal information must not use that information without taking steps to ensure it is accurate, up-to-date, complete, relevant and not misleading.
9. Personal information shall not be kept for longer than required for its lawful use.
10. Personal information shall not be used for any purpose to that for which it was obtained unless the source of the information is a publicly available publication or the use of the information for another purpose was authorised by the individual concerned.
11. Personal information shall not be disclosed unless the disclosure is directly related to the reason for which the information was originally collected, or the source of the information is a publicly available document, or the disclosure is authorised by the individual concerned.
12. You should not assign a unique identifier to an individual unless it is necessary to carry out the lawful functions of your business.

More information about the privacy act can be found at www.privacy.org.nz/privacy-act

Checklist

• I have received either expressed, inferred or deemed consent from my subscriber database
• I have included accurate information about our company (the sender) within the message
• I have included clear details of how recipients can contact our company
• I have included a functional way for people to unsubscribe from our communications (e.g. an unsubscribe link)
• I have included the reason why the recipient is receiving the message. (a reminder that they have provided consent)
• I have included a method for recipients to be able to access and modify their personal information.
• I am recording all instances of permission granted by subscribers, unsubscriptions and history of messages sent to individuals.
• I have an electronic process in place to confirm verbally granted consent
• I do not use electronic address harvesting software to create mailing lists
• I do not purchase or use mailing lists that have been generated from harvesting software

For more information on complying with the ‘Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007’ go to:

www.antispam.govt.nz
www.antispam.govt.nz/Pubforms.nsf/URL/BusinessGuide.pdf/$file/BusinessGuide.pdf
www.marketing.org.nz/cms/Important_Notice/3727

Jacqui Jones is the Lead Consultant and Search and Online Marketing Specialist of search engine optimization agency Netconcepts and e-mail service provider GravityMail.

According to studies, fully one-third of permission-based e-mails are not even delivered. If you’re lucky enough to reach the recipient’s inbox, you still have to worry about getting your e-mail opened and read.

For most recipients it is a split-second decision whether or not to delete your e-mail — a decision based almost entirely on the From line and the Subject line. And if that doesn’t sound harrowing enough, there are plenty of other hazards in the design and layout of the e-mail.

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

So many designers of e-mail campaigns make the fatal mistake of designing the e-mail to be viewed in its entirety. E-mail doesn’t work like that. E-mail is scrolled through and in very small windows.

If you design the e-mail to look like a Web page and allocate valuable screen real estate at the top of your e-mail to masthead graphics and branding messages, you relegate the key messages to reside “below the fold” of the preview pane.

If your recipient doesn’t get your key message from what displays immediately in the preview pane, they probably won’t invest the effort in reading your e-mail or taking your desired action.

Cut to the chase. The first paragraph should be very easy to scan and should be a good overview of the key messages that you are trying to impart. The From line and the Subject line is where your branding goes — the From line in particular — rather than in gratuitous graphics.

Decide what is the one point that you want to get across and make that point in your Subject line. A Subject line of “September edition of ABC Company’s e-mail newsletter” is not compelling, as it offers no value proposition or clue as to the e-mail’s contents.

Scrolling through five screens within the preview pane is too much to ask of your recipient. If you have a lot of copy, move most of it to one or more landing pages. If your e-mail is full of images, move those to landing pages as well. People are not nearly as tolerant of slow download times in their e-mail clients as they are in their Web browsers.

PICTURE PERFECT?

Making life even more difficult for e-mail marketers, some e-mail clients like Outlook 2003 and Web mail services like Gmail don’t display images by default.

Thus, any important content locked up within images won’t be readily accessible to many recipients, particularly if the image doesn’t include an “alt” attribute (alternate text that displays when image loading is turned off).

Likely, the image height and width attributes were not defined, because if they were, the image placeholder box would take up an unnecessarily large amount of screen real estate.

Then there are the campaigns that don’t look “designed” at all.

These are the e-mails that could have been created by the office assistant using Microsoft Word. If the e-mail has too many conflicting styles — too many different font faces and colors and a lack of consistency in their use — then it will look like spam.

If you don’t have the resources to design a properly formatted, professionally designed e-mail campaign, don’t try to muddle through it. Rather, refrain from any formatting more extensive than bolded headings and bullet points.

Even able designers shouldn’t try to get too sophisticated with CSS (cascading style sheets), because some e-mail clients won’t be able to display them properly.

CSS is fine for setting font faces and sizes, but trying to lay out the page with CSS would be a mistake. Use tables instead. I know that is a very ’90s thing to say, but for e-mail marketing that is what you need to do. Try to use as few tables as possible, and avoid the use of nested tables.

Every graphically rich e-mail needs to have a message at the very top stating something to the effect of “If you can’t read this message, click here” which will take the recipient to a Web page containing a properly formatted version of the e-mail.

There is no point having such a message five lines down into the HTML code, because your recipient isn’t going to scour the HTML code looking for the link.

TEXT CONTEXT

Including within your e-mail a plain text version (using “multi-part MIME”) isn’t just good for recipients running e-mail clients incapable of displaying HTML. It also makes your e-mail more palatable to the spam filters. That’s because many spammers don’t bother making multi-part e-mails.

Within the HTML “part,” aim for a high ratio of text copy to HTML coding. Spammers often rely on images to hide text that will get picked up by the spam filters — phrases like “free access,” “best rates,” “big savings,” “call now,” “full refund,” “guaranteed,” “incredible” and “opportunity” — resulting in a low text to HTML ratio. Crafting an e-mail that will get past the spam filters is not straightforward.

Thankfully, spam-scoring tools exist, such as the free tool at www.gravitymail.com/spamscore.php (excuse the plug, please). It will run your e-mail through SpamAssassin, one of the most popular spam filters among Internet service providers, and generate a report detailing the penalties that you racked up.

Never send a campaign out before scoring it first.

ADDRESS MATTERS

As previously stated above, your From line should, in most cases, include your company name or brand name. Only include a personal name in the From line if the recipient is going to recognize that name.

If, for example, you are a hotel sending out a campaign to previous guests and your e-mail is “From” your general manager, nobody is going to know who that is and your e-mail will be deleted.

Oh, and by the way, don’t forget to include your physical address at the bottom of the message for CAN-SPAM compliance.

E-mail is a very different medium from the Web, and it requires a different approach. If you don’t see to its exacting demands and the seeming minutiae, your campaign will fall short.

You can’t just hire a Web designer to design you an e-mail template and expect them to do a good job. Nor can you simply bang out an e-mail in WordPad and expect it to get past the spam filters.

Welcome to e-mail marketing’s second epoch.

Stephan Spencer is president of search engine optimization agency Netconcepts and e-mail service provider GravityMail, both Madison, WI. Reach him at .

In part one, we discussed the coming of age of email marketing. Here, in the second part, we discuss the block-and-tackle issues of getting past the spam filters so your message is heard.

Spam filters tend to be the bane of the email marketer’s existence. Getting past them is a serious challenge, and it is becoming increasingly harder. How can an email marketer consistently bypass those spam filters?

Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question here. If you are a marketer who is truly focused on the customer’s needs and on creating relevancy for that customer, you will already have a strategy that is focused on ensuring that your email conversations are relevant to your customers and are delivering value in relation to their needs.

Having said that, you can be doing everything right… and your mail might still end up in a junk folder — unless you go that extra step. In the B2B world, you are now at the mercy of every gatekeeper in every company you are trying to deliver into, and that becomes a much more important dynamic. Confirmed opt-in is obviously the best way to go.

Whether you are a B2C company or a B2B company, it is important to invest resources into staying on top of these issues. It’s a moving target: new authentication procedures, shifts in adoption of varying anti-spam technology, and knowing what is the current flavor-of-the-month with spam filters that evolve as each day passes.

Unless you have in-house resources to track these changes, you may need to consider working with an email service provider that has invested in this capability.

You also need to ensure that your strategies are actually working for you. A service provider can help you set up test accounts to track how your email is being rendered to your email clients. Make sure that the messages you think are relevant and appropriate for the ISP are actually rendering correctly when you get through. Take a global view, too, on the need for ISP relations.

Email tools will enable you to score your email before you send it out. Some of these are actually built right into the email software.

DoubleClick, for instance, has a tool that allows its clients to score the content of their messages against various spam blocking and filtering applications. It is just one of many tools available that will help marketers identify and correct some of those issues. For those who aren’t using a service with spam scoring capabilities built-in, there is a free spam scoring tool available from GravityMail.

A mailbox monitoring service can seed your email list with test accounts across all top ISPs — and measure not just whether the message was delivered but also where it got delivered. One thing you have to be sensitive to is whether your messages are ending up in bulk mail folders or junk mail folders. That’s important, because according to research, consumers and email recipients tend not to check those accounts.

Email marketers should also consider delivering content via RSS. It is a great supplemental channel; when combined with your database, it can be event-driven and can be tracked — illuminating subscriber behaviors such as opens and click-throughs. If you are already using an internal content management system for your email marketing, you can easily customize it to do the same. While RSS publishing and marketing technology is not as developed as it could be, there are opportunities for companies to bravely take RSS marketing to the next level.

Our experts could have devoted an entire day to this topic, but in short they agree that if you are not investing in managing email deliverability, either through your own in-house resources or through external resources, you are likely to face a lot of issues that you may not even realize today.

Anti-spam laws: What you’re probably missing

The passing of the CAN-SPAM Act into law spawned a host of marketing professionals dispensing advice, but very few lawyers who could effectively interpret the law. If you have a major email marketing program in your company or work in the email marketing industry, don’t rely on just articles for your information. It is worth talking to a lawyer to make sure that you are in compliance.

You would be amazed at the number of large companies that still don’t include a physical address in their email communications. The CAN-SPAM Act, with regard to civil liabilities, also applies to just one email message — in other words, one salesperson sending one message and not just newsletters or ads going to tens of thousands of people. It’s a good idea to periodically remind your people to include your company’s address in all email communications.

In addition, the CAN-SPAM Act has requirements with regard to header information. If you are sending out email from your own email server, make sure that your IP address has a reverse lookup. CAN-SPAM applies to all commercial email, including permission-based email. It requires an identifier in the email subject, and the best way to deal with this is to make sure you always use your company name or its abbreviation in your commercial email.

When it comes to Europe, the EU Directive is only a set of guidelines with no specific rules for email marketing. Every EU country may interpret these individually. While in some countries there is spam legislation, in others there is privacy legislation, and sometimes there can be a mix of up to five or six legislations dictating what you can or cannot do as an email marketer. The only rule of thumb is to seek legal counsel when email marketing in Europe, because there are risks.

It’s an evolving landscape, too, as evidenced by the FCC’s recently released guidelines (visit www.fcc.gov for more information) that wireless email domains be treated differently and have a higher threshold for whether you should be mailing commercial messages to them.

In a similar vein, the FTC has put out guidelines around the Primary Purpose Rule, which pertains to whether a message is considered commercial or transactional. Different standards pertain to each.

Hopefully, you have a strong legal skill set within your in-house privacy team, because you need to be tracking these issues. Otherwise, work with providers that can really help you stay on top of these issues… because it isn’t just one “gotcha” at any one point in time.

Multi-list suppression

Is there a way around multi-list suppression, which CAN-SPAM seems to require? This has become a very hot question.

It is the marketers’ responsibility to manage opt-outs and ensure that their efforts are CAN-SPAM compliant, regardless of where they are getting their lists. Companies like Unsubscribe Central and Smart Source have created tools that help marketers leverage lists from multiple sources. These software programs harvest information from secondary list sources as well as house lists.

If you are renting lists or working with shared lists or a list aggregator, make sure that you are working with people who comply with all CAN-SPAM practices. Before you decide to rent a list from a provider or share a list, do an audit. Ask for proof of how the provider has been managing opt-outs in the past. Ask for examples of client companies that you can speak with so you can talk to someone about what the provider has really done. Do due diligence up front and build a warranty into your contract, so that if something goes wrong (if the provider doesn’t uphold its end of the bargain, or the list it gives you is somehow inappropriate or not compliant), you are protected.

The CAN-SPAM Act applies to senders — not as you and I might define a sender, but as the statute defines a sender. When the Act first came into being, people argued that you needed to worry about multi-list suppression when you rented an email list from, say, a third-party vendor.

Interestingly, the FTC recently handed down an opinion that has been posted on the Direct Marketing Association Web site that says the following: If you run a third-party list and someone advertises on your list but the messages you send out contain only the design of your advertisers (full message ads, not short ads within newsletters) then you as the publisher (i.e., the list owner), as well as the advertiser, are going to have to remove opt-outs from your respective lists.

However, if you are a list owner and you send out ads wrapped in a branded template that looks like a newsletter you published and recipients know who is sending it time after time, CAN-SPAM is only going to apply to you, the list owner and not to the advertiser. The advertiser is almost like an author providing an article for your newsletter.

The key is what the recipient thinks. Life becomes a lot simpler by using a branded template that looks exactly the same in every mailing, because people then know exactly from whom they are getting that email; that’s what CAN-SPAM cares about. And, in that situation, only the list owner would have to deal with opt-outs, which makes a lot more sense from a logistical perspective, because, as an advertiser, it’s not your list. You are just advertising, and it’s not fair to expect you to deal with opt-outs from that list. That said, this is not an FTC rule at this point, merely an opinion.

What makes a remarkable campaign?

We all recognize an ordinary campaign. It says: “Hey, everybody, buy one and get one free. Sign up now!” It’s a big blast campaign that communicates the same messages to millions of people.

An extraordinary campaign is not a campaign at all — but an email relationship that delivers value and carefully monitors frequency. Somewhere in between your audience, your product and the value that you provide is a newsletter or a series of emails that people not only want to get but will forward to friends and bring you more subscribers.

An extraordinary email management system is one that knows who you are, knows what you like, knows how often you want to receive emails and sends email for you instead of the sender.

The spectrum of email sophistication consists of three segments. The first is very basic. These are folks who are fairly new and are taking the blast approach. They are sending the same message to all of their customers, maybe once a week, just because that seems like a good rule of thumb. But there’s no real analysis or customer information that’s being put into helping them decide how to vary the content or the frequency of the message.

Then there are the middle-of-the-road folks. These are people who are a little more experienced and are just starting to toy with some customer segmentation. So they maybe have two, three, four customer segments, and they are really trying to send different messages to those customer segments based on demographics, past purchase behavior, etc.

Then we have the much more sophisticated folks who are going about an email conversation approach. They are really thinking about what motivates the customer to respond and buy and “How should I be sequencing my messages to get them to further engage in a relationship with me?”

A great example in the sophisticated arena is ski resort company IntraWest. Its strategy has been to engage in an email conversation after the customer books but before he or she visits the resort. Within a period of about six weeks from the time you make your reservation to the time you visit the resort, IntraWest sends different messages that are focused on helping you secure your ski lessons, rent your equipment and upgrade your room.

From IntraWest’s perspective, the idea is to gain more revenue from customers. The value it is providing to customers is in helping them prepare for the trip, enjoy an even better vacation, and feel as if IntraWest has their best interests at heart.

Essential components to any email campaign are the quality of the list, the creative content of the email you are sending out, and the landing page you are directing your recipients to. An ordinary campaign usually focuses on just one or two of these, while an extraordinary one focuses on all three.

Think of email as telling a story — an ongoing story in which you develop a relationship with the recipient over the course of several messages. This allows you to focus on one idea per email message. One of the problems, particularly in B2B email, is that the products that the companies are trying to promote are very complex. They try to discuss all the features in just one email message. Focusing on one feature per email is much more effective.

Extraordinary campaigns incorporate testing and how that message is cued up. It is not uncommon to see a 20% lift in performance in an email campaign simply by just testing different subject lines. Companies need to be more disciplined in this regard.

Extraordinary campaigns also create a dialogue with trigger- or event-based messages based on recent customer activity, a milestone in their customer life cycle or a particular event, all of which are well-received by the recipient. Focusing on a strategic direction for the business involves more time and analysis of results, but a business lives and breathes based on one-to-one connections with its customers.

Today’s technology has paved a level playing field such that anyone can do good email if they want to. Take a little company like JamBase, an event ticketing business that takes time to understand the genres of music you like and the kinds of venues you are likely to see a concert in. It sends you emails that are timely and relevant based on those combinations: namely, the right band or the right event in the right venue. As a result, you get emails sporadically — perhaps three emails in a month, but then you may not hear from them for three months because they don’t have anything relevant to say to you.

The net result is you pay more attention, you respond more and you appreciate them because they are educating you with messages like: “Hey, if you like Guster, Chris, this band is very similar. They’ve got some new music. Click here to see a download, and they are going to be playing at this venue that I know you like.” That’s an example of an outstanding email communication, and it doesn’t take a lot of resources to do it right.

Most effective email marketing tactics

Turn off images in your emails. Make sure your campaigns look good without them. Really focus on your “From” line, “Subject” line, and preview pane view. Identify which one hyperlink out of all the hyperlinks in your email is the one golden hyperlink that should carry most of your traffic.

Statistics reveal the vast proportion of people who click on links generally click on only one link, even though you may have dozens in your campaign. Make your golden hyperlink easy to see, the obvious choice to direct people into the area you really want them to go.

Test. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do, and probably the least utilized. You can have the best looking creative in the world… and the worst one might perform better in an email. Unless you are testing these elements, you don’t know that. In fact, keep testing, and keep measuring. You will be amazed at what works and what doesn’t. Think about integrating Web analytics into your email so you’ve got a total picture of what is really happening.

How often should you email? Today’s technology means you should be able to email every subscriber at the right frequency for them. Give your customers the choice. When they subscribe, identify what frequency and what subject matters they want from you, and send them the content they want.

Practice serial storytelling. It is the complete opposite of the so-called email blast. It contains a rich contextual framework that, basically, applies on two levels. If you are placing an ad in the newsletter, how good is the surrounding content in which your ad is going to be placed? If you are sending out an entire email message, again, how good is that content and what other types of email messages are you sending out? The richer the context of your promotional messages, the more likely a quid pro quo develops between you and the recipient so that they pay more attention to what you are trying to say.

The big issues facing email marketing

Thanks to the magic of email, you can communicate with anyone at the right time with the right message in the right context. We are moving rapidly from the idea of email as a cheap mass-marketing tool to email as an unbelievably effective one-to-one communication tool. It will be full steam ahead throughout 2006.

Data integration also looks to be a big player in 2006, as marketers leverage email in conjunction with other marketing channels. For the last three or four years, email has been largely a standalone communication channel, albeit a great way to communicate with your customers.

An even better way is to create a multi-channel conversation with your customers. Soon we will see those sophisticated folks who are now doing email conversations move into cross-channel conversations, employing email in conjunction with phone calls, online ads, and postal mail as a seamless way to talk to their customers through whatever channel the customer prefers — and potentially through several different channels, depending on where they are in the conversation.

There is a lot of conversation going on right now in the US relating to data and privacy, and various problems being reported in the press about data breaches. There is likely to be a spillover effect on how legislators and others scrutinize the use of client data. Data will have to exist in an environment that involves more oversight from governments and possibly other organizations as well.

Companies will once again focus on email list growth. Over recent years, the notion of growing lists and bringing in new customers hasn’t been a focal point as it was in the early days of email. Realizing that those fresh new names on their customer files are the most responsive, a lot of companies will start dedicating attention, resources and investment dollars into growing that list once again — but it won’t be as easy, because people are now reluctant to provide email addresses to just anybody who asks for it. It has to be earned.

Deliverability will continue to be an issue. We are not going to stop spam in its tracks, which means marketers have got to be a lot smarter about what they are sending. Phishing may overtake spam in terms of the kind of email that marketers are really concerned about, due to its damage to brands and reputations.

2006 will be the year when marketers finally “get it”—that testing plus measurement equals return on investment. Not just “Did they open it? Did they read it? Did they click on it,” but “Let’s do some further measurements, let’s do the data integration to see whether or not they clicked through and got to the money page, whether that’s a purchase or a download or a registration.” They will look at the cost of sales on using email as a promotional tool and ask: “Are we getting the payoff we want, including measuring the impact it has on our brand?” They’ll be measuring attitudes, not just clicks. Marketers will finally click on to this for a competitive edge.

Consolidating technology platforms will begin to ease the retrieval of data, facilitating the increased use of segmentation and personalization. With RSS as one application and email another, the need to do centralized management of data collection, data mining and content delivery will become apparent.

Tackling spam issues and deliverability in-house is no fun, and we are likely to see the consolidation of smaller email service providers because of deliverability issues, with privacy and data security feeding that trend.

Five years from now, we are likely to see sophistication around the end user’s ability to control email, with more gatekeeper devices managing people’s inboxes. We will see tools that enable people to search the content of their email, categorize and save messages. Email marketing will evolve to keep pace with these gatekeeper features, and you will need a very good relationship with the customer to do so.

Rich media is likely to have a role within email. For a variety of reasons, including virus concerns around how it displays in a recipient’s inbox, rich media hasn’t really taken off. Overcoming some of those challenges will result in its taking center stage in email, as in the online advertising that we see today.

Inbox studies indicate consumers get a little over 300 emails a week, including personal emails, marketing messages and spam. By 2010, this number is projected to grow to around 500, after a leveling off around 2008 due to a couple of happenings expected around then.

The first is a tapering off in email for acquisition purposes, as marketers finally realize the amount of money they are spending on renting lists isn’t worth it for the response they are getting.

Second, spam will decline with the introduction of a postage stamp, or some form of currency or charge for email delivery. There are predictions, too, that people will opt in to about 17 marketing promotional emails each week.

RSS will increasingly integrate with email clients such as Outlook. It is already happening. Marketers, particularly RSS marketers, will compete against not only other email messages but also other RSS feeds which may have greater relevance than email messages because RSS is easier to unsubscribe from than email. If you no longer want an RSS feed in your newsreader or aggregator, it takes just two seconds to remove it.

Perhaps marketers may not get better, but email quality nonetheless will. Filters will simply allow you to see only the messages you want. Whether by postage stamp, artificial intelligence or just because email systems will be able to recognize what you like, you will be able to open up the box that says “this is work-related, this is from family, this is advertising for air travel, this is advertising for clothing,” and you go to the one you are interested in at the moment. And that’s what RSS does for consumers right now.

Having just finished reading a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, written by Ray Kurzweil, one of the most famous artificial intelligence experts in the world, I am quite convinced that in five years we are going to see some fundamental changes due to artificial intelligence and computer processor speed improvements and so forth. All in all, it’s a pretty exciting time.

Which begs the question: Is email marketing, as we know it, doomed?

In its current state, perhaps. But with advancing age comes wisdom. The effectiveness of email is still hamstrung by spam, as we are limited by our inability to get our messages delivered because of spam filters. But email’s current problems are merely challenges. And where there are challenges, there are opportunities.

MarketingProfs convened a Thought Leaders Summit of global experts to discuss the issues facing email marketers today. On hand were Chris Baggot, founding partner of ExactTarget; Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net and author of Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS; Eric Kirby, senior vice-president and general manager for email solutions at DoubleClick; Chris Price, managing director of Permission; Neil Squillante, president of Landing Page Interactive; Jim Sterne, consultant, speaker and founding director of the Web Analytics Association; and Shar VanBoskirk, consulting analyst with Forester Research.

(Here’s a complete list of the participants and their bios, as well as links to the audio recording and transcripts.)

On one thing we all agreed: Because of its innate and powerful ability to communicate one-to-one with customers, the essential value of email marketing is unlikely to change. But its cost-effectiveness has been its Achilles heel; so many marketers are now using email that consumers are overwhelmed.

Left to its own devices, email marketing is unlikely to survive. However, if email marketers take responsibility for developing great strategy and execution, we are likely to bring on its evolution.

In fact, the evolution of email marketing is already evident in the issues facing the industry today, as spam and inbox clutter — both big topics of conversation — have made it harder to build and gain results from email marketing.

Three years of recorded benchmark data show click rates have been remarkably stable, demonstrating that companies that are smart and have good practices continue to evolve techniques, programs and targeting. In other words, best practices allow some companies to surge ahead of some of those challenges.

RSS—friend or foe?

Will RSS replace email as a marketing channel over time, or will both technologies work cooperatively together?

On this, all of our panelists agreed. RSS is unlikely to stage a takeover any time soon. Due to the relative maturity of email marketing compared with RSS, one would be hard-pressed to find in RSS the same level of marketing functionality, targeting, personalization and metrics capabilities that “come standard” with most email marketing packages. That said, RSS technology is progressing rapidly.

Of course, email technology is not standing still, either. Much is being done to eliminate the spam problem. Mainstream media continues to report that the amount of spam being sent is increasing. But what they are failing to report is that the amount actually getting through to individual mailboxes is decreasing. What the recipient is experiencing matters, and a lot of recipients are experiencing less spam than they used to.

In the end, it is all about user choice. Just as we have seen with email, some consumers simply won’t want to embrace RSS. But as Yahoo rolls out RSS and MSN makes it readily available, the consumer will have more exposure to RSS, and marketers will be looking for an additional tool to distribute the marketing messages that they couldn’t maneuver past spam filters.

For end users, RSS technology as an email replacement lacks ease of use. Simply said: It’s just not that straightforward for the uninitiated to subscribe to and follow RSS feeds. It’s hard enough explaining to an RSS newbie what an RSS feed is; just try walking that person through the installation and use of an RSS newsreader software or Web-based aggregator.

Then there’s the issue of recipient identity. Currently, most RSS feeds are just one feed for everyone to use, which means you lack the identity of email. But with an email list of, say, 10,000 people, each email goes to just one person, and you can feel pretty confident that you have 10,000 people on your list.

Email and RSS are often appropriate for different content types, our panelists said. For instance, email is the top channel for delivery, whereas RSS is more useful for high-frequency content updates. It’s not only about getting your content delivered to end users, but about improving your online visibility, search engine rankings, driving new traffic through RSS search engine directories, syndicating your content on other Web media and so on.

With RSS, there are ways you can create a unique, trackable URL per subscriber that do not have to be through HTTP authentication. But there are also certain solutions in the market now that generally feed per user and even allow for data capture; that is, the user can now register and receive a unique URL.

One of the problems, however, is that if a user incorporates that into Bloglines and shares it with the world, you may have a situation where that one unique URL is actually being subscribed to by a bunch of people. That’s one situation where HTTP authentication can help, because that usually limits that particular feed to just one person.

RSS is going to be a user-driven decision. People are going to choose whether they want to receive communications as email. There will be a lot of pressure on publishers to produce highly valuable content that will remain in the inbox, whereas less valuable content will be pushed aside for people to pick up via RSS.

Can we fix it? Yes… Well, maybe

Email is a conversational medium. It allows the marketer to send a communication to which customers can actually respond. However, marketers have often treated it as direct mail without the postage and paper.

People’s expectations are changing. Legitimate email marketers are now waking up to the realization that their email campaigns are getting less attention than 12 or 18 months ago.

Email marketing is not just an ad-hoc promotion-focused approach, but one that intends to answer your needs and makes you want to open the message and perhaps buy. The goal is for sellers to recognize that they must deliver value to the end users.

Consumers are looking for “easy” — an easy way to identify the people or entities from which they want to receive emails. Nothing is more frustrating than missing a wanted piece of information because your spam filter ate it. The approach of identification, authentication and recognition would go a long way toward fixing what ails the email marketing industry.

Let’s go back 12 years or so to the Peppers and Rogers “One-to-One Future” theory: That theory was never executable because there wasn’t a medium that would let us take data and behavior and drive it into relevant, timely one-to-one communications and interactions. Email has given us the tool to do that. But email has been misused and slighted, because the metric for successful email has focused on things like open rates instead of the human-to-human interaction. Consumers attitudes are now “talk to me when you have something to say.” And, “Say something relevant, appreciate me and give me an opportunity to respond.” The panelists say that marketers are seeing a lot of that in current email trends in 2005.

Roadblocks, obstacles and speed bumps

What are the biggest obstacles facing email marketers today? Believe it or not, spam (and issues associated with spam) are actually becoming less of a concern for most companies today. Those that are leading in the field now have very good ways of managing and dealing with the issue and are turning their attention to working out how to keep their customers engaged by deriving deeper insight and intelligence into their customers’ needs so that they can tailor their messages appropriately. It’s about being able to access, organize and act on the detailed data that enables that kind of communication.

Email as a marketing communications vehicle hasn’t received executive-level attention because it’s been viewed as a low-cost (albeit effective) channel that really hasn’t merged into the overall contact strategy of most organizations today.

Along with that, companies are trying to manage a corporate governance-model email strategy. This is true especially in large enterprises with multiple brands and multiple divisions. There, securing a consistent permission strategy and contact strategy across those various divisions will ensure that your customers are being treated appropriately from their point of view, and not just from the point of view of one single division or brand.

Most companies find it difficult to come up with really compelling content on a regular basis. The best email from a marketing perspective comprises a blend of promotional material with real editorial content. And that’s difficult for a lot of companies to achieve if they are not media companies — or don’t have journalists or copywriters on staff.

Many opt-in third-party newsletter lists lack context. For some reason, the email marketing sector determined that people who joined these lists would receive ads only, which worked great at first, but the problem now is no context. If you are a member of such a list, all you are receiving is ads. You are not receiving any real editorial content, and that is a problem. And, believe it or not, there is a dearth of newsletters in some industries.

Perhaps the largest obstacle facing email marketers are the marketers themselves. Some are not performing enough due diligence on issues like “How should I really be leveraging this medium? What are the messages that are appropriate to communicate via email? Who are the customers who are appropriate for me to be communicating through email with?”

Instead, some marketers are enamored with the notion that they can send out a ton of messages inexpensively, especially coming from a direct-mail perspective, and that email is an overwhelming opportunity. Because of this, we now face the obstacles that have been created, like the spam issue and the over-emailing issue, which lead consumers to want to opt out or just stop replying.

But given that clickthrough rates have stayed fairly constant year after year, email is still valued. It’s still effective. It’s just that marketers have to make sure that they are doing everything they can to maintain a “permission” relationship with their customers — and that means they need to use email to meet their customers’ needs rather than promote merely their own business goals. Putting the customers’ needs at the forefront of their strategy is paramount. If they don’t do that, they are creating an obstacle for themselves and for the industry at large.

It’s also about relevance. How can email marketers increase the relevance of their campaigns to garner attention? How can they nurture individual relationships over a long period of time? With that mindset, email becomes a much stronger tool.

One final take on spam: It’s almost a cost of entry nowadays. Everybody understands it. And everybody knows how he or she should be dealing with it.

Email tracking and reporting — is it reliable?

When it comes to email tracking and reporting, nothing is black and white (or transparent, for that matter). There are many technical and operational reasons why you are not going to get exact data on statistics like open rates. For one, we may enjoy greater success if we all used the same yardstick!

Perhaps it’s better to ask: “Am I getting better open rates than yesterday?” The difference between the two is a more trustworthy number. If your open rates are going down, it is up to you as a marketer to figure out how to improve them.

Open rates typically fall into more of a branding-type measure. If you can double the number of people who hit “reply,” even if your overall open rate goes down, what is the better metric?

Some of the problem is with industry measures as well as the kind of email that people are sending. Gigantic retailers dominate by overall volume of email, but typically they are not very good emailers. It’s therefore skewing to look at a total pie that is predominantly influenced by people doing weekly blasts of coupons or special offers that aren’t very relevant. As one of the panelists said: “OK, now tell me what happens when I add more data. Tell me what happens when I decrease my frequency for a certain segment of individuals and things like that.”

In other words, measure what you are really trying to accomplish — not measure open rates or clickthroughs as the total goal of success. Again, that’s an impression model left over from television, which, in our business, reeks of the dark ages.

The yardstick is actually shrinking, and here’s why: Over the past year, more and more email software clients have been adopting a feature that in many cases, by default, will block images from displaying in a message. Given how we actually track opens in emai — using uniquely named, one-pixel images known as “Web bugs” — the act of opening will not be visible to the email marketer if the request to load the “Web bug” isn’t made.

Previously, a display within the preview pane in Outlook would have counted as an open, as long as the recipient was online at the time. Today it won’t — assuming the recipient hasn’t changed that default setting in their new version of Outlook. ISPs and email software providers are adopting this feature because they figure that spam of a graphic nature won’t display unless the user takes an action to display those messages. But, in doing so, they simultaneously sabotage the marketer’s ability to measure campaign effectiveness.

DoubleClick actually sees this downward trend in opens in data tracking quarter to quarter. Looking back over the past year of long-term trending data among a similar set of companies, they see slight declines occurring in email open rates. However, analysis indicates that it is being driven by the image-blocking phenomenon. The reason DoubleClick can say that is because other metrics that, over time, directly correlate with open rates, such as click-through rates, have actually maintained their performance levels.

In the case of open rates, that number actually is changing and has to do with how that number is calculated, which could be seen as a good thing because it’s a measure of somebody’s engagement in opening up your message. If somebody has to take the extra steps to display images, you know that that person is truly opening and it wasn’t just an accident.

One other metric you probably want to be thinking about in terms of whether it is believable or accurate has to do with purchases and purchase rates. The reason for that is because the only purchases that we can directly, in most cases, attribute back to email are ones that occur online that we can then associate back to a click from that email.

Most companies aren’t sophisticated enough to actually look at the multi-channel impact of their email messages — as when, for example, an email campaign recipient goes in to a store and buys or opens up a catalog and buys over the phone. That isn’t being captured today in most cases in email metrics, which actually causes people to under-report or under-credit the impact of email in their overall marketing efforts.

If you are buying an ad in an email newsletter, you may want to see whether the company publishes that email newsletter in HTML. You may want to inquire about whether you can run a text ad in that newsletter, as opposed to a banner, because if you run a text ad, it will still show up even with the images not being turned on, whereas if you run a banner it won’t show up unless the end user actually clicks to turn on the images.

It’s surprising how few marketers are looking at trends. Even though the technology and the data are there, marketers aren’t utilizing them. Email tracking is really about trend-watching rather than exactly pinpointing the actual and absolute numbers. The trends are enough to give us an impression of what works, what doesn’t and what, in fact, creates a sale. In the end, that is the most important thing.

Common traps and pitfalls

The biggest trap for email marketers is falling into that mass marketing blast. You can do everything right — get the right permissions, confirm opt-in, be CAN-SPAM compliant — and then you blow it by sending me offers or things that are more interesting to you, the sender, than me, the recipient.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, because it brings a pretty good return on investment compared with other media, but it is not real data-driven communication.

Another trap is trying to say too much. Some people just try to cram too much in an email, not realizing that they have only a limited amount of time to get their message across.

Another one is not understanding the complexity of the medium. Some people are blindly going on as if they are immune to deliverability and CAN-SPAM issues, whereas the smart email marketers are engaging professionals and experts around them, or choosing suppliers with skills and coming to grips with that complexity.

Selecting an email marketing vendor

They’re a dime a dozen, so how can you pick ‘em?

For the most part, email vendors all have the same basic capabilities in terms of delivery, reporting, testing and helping to ensure delivery (through SpamAssassin scoring, etc.) and thus should be up to the task technically. From a marketer’s perspective, the things to look for are which tools are the best fit for you, how easy it is to use their system and what kind of support you get. Do you need a lot of hand-holding to make it happen? If so, can you get it when you need it? Are there people available during your business hours and after hours?

But, first, do some due diligence around what you are looking for, why you want to work with an outsource provider and what it is that you are looking for based on what you have internally.

Be prepared to direct the partner in a relationship. This may not mean that you have to tell the provider everything you want to do because that is probably why you are looking for a provider — to help you. But it does mean that you need to take responsibility for your part in the relationship and be aware of why you are selecting them. Can they be trusted? Do some cross-checking so that you know that the provider you are working with is in fact delivering on what they said they would.

Study their background. Are they stable? How long have they been in the industry? What is their expertise? How many employees do they have dedicated to each of the areas that are important to you? What is their client renewal rate?

And then you’ll want to get at some of the intangibles that are beyond what they’ll normally tell you. Can you actually talk to some of their clients? Can they uncover some of these hidden gems or secret best practices that may not be the mainstream things that anybody can come up with?

Are they philosophically aligned with what your real goals are? A lot of email vendors are volume-driven. That’s how most are compensated. Remember that volume is not in the best interest of you, the client.

More importantly, ask the right questions: How do you drive lifetime value? How do you drive data-driven communications? Is volume the correct measure of success? In the mass-marketing world, it is; and for a lot of email vendors, it is. Asking such questions will certainly reveal the vendor’s philosophy on lifetime value.

* * *

Part 2 of this article tackles the really thorny issue of getting past those spam filters. We reveal hidden “gotcha’s” in CAN-SPAM and other anti-spam legislation that marketers are missing, ways around multi-list suppression, differentiating an ordinary email marketing campaign from an extraordinary one, top most-effective email marketing techniques and major issues that will be affecting the email marketing industry in 2006.

Typically these filters and firewalls run email messages through “tests” that have certain numbers of points assigned to them. If the cumulative points score reaches a certain threshold (usually set by the email server administrator), the message is trashed rather than delivered.

You can lose points as well as gain them. Losing points is a good thing, since you want to avoid reaching the threshold value where your message is considered spam. For example, if your message contains “quoted” email text from a previous message, you can score a fair number of negative, or credit, points.

More likely than not, you’re innocently racking up spam points for seemingly innocuous words, phrases, styles, and layout. There are thousands of “rules” to abide by if you want to get past the filters. There are rules for the “from” line, the “to” line, the subject line, the HTML source code, and of course the copy in the message body.

To avoid the email black hole, you would be wise to adhere to the following guidelines when crafting your email campaigns:

• Don’t greet your recipient with a salutation beginning with “Dear.”
• Don’t claim that the recipient was on a list.
• Don’t claim that the recipient registered at your site.
• Don’t claim that your message is not spam.
• Don’t claim that you obtained the recipient’s address legitimately.
• Don’t claim that the recipient gave you permission or opted in.
• Don’t claim that the recipient was registered with one of your marketing partners.
• Don’t claim that you respect all removal requests.
• Don’t claim that you comply with various regulations/House bills/Senate bills.
• Don’t explain why the recipient is receiving your offer.
• Don’t suggest that the recipient might have received the email by mistake.
• Don’t use “click here” links.
• Don’t link “remove me” to an email address.
• Don’t link your opt-out to a page that contains the word “remove” in the URL.
• Include a copyright notice.
• Avoid “spammy”-sounding words and phrases, such as “opportunity,” “money back,” “incredible,” “targeted,” and “offer.”

As you can see, the spam filters penalize for a lot of innocuous expressions that are commonly used by i.merchants, simply because spammers use them with greater frequency. (For even more of these phrases, see “Get Out Your Thesaurus” on page 26.) It’s difficult to totally avoid using these phrases, but use them sparingly. Consider it a chance to show your creativity and add personality to your email by avoiding standard sales phraseology.

Feeling overwhelmed yet? We’ve just scratched the surface!

In the “from” line:

• Include a real name, not just an email address.
• Include lower-case characters.
• Don’t end it with a number.

In the “to” line:

• Make sure the recipient’s email address is listed.
• Never use “CC” or “BCC.”

In the subject line:

• Don’t include the recipient’s email user name. (Note: Incorporating the recipient’s first name into the subject line often increases open rates. It may, however, also trip the spam filters and email firewalls when the recipient’s email user name and first name are one and the same.)
• Don’t include “Now Only” or “Hello” or “Free” or “Buy.”
• Don’t use all caps. (Retailers are notorious for this. As tempting as it is to scream out your promotion, you need to calm down. Don’t forget, spammers are excited too.)
• Don’t pad it with extra “gappy” white space - anywhere.
• Don’t include a unique ID.
• Avoid using exclamation marks.
• If it’s a regularly scheduled newsletter, include the date or month of the issue (e.g. May 2003) and “newsletter,” “news,” “list,” or the frequency (”daily,” “weekly,” “monthly”).

Then there’s the litany of spam-catching rules governing the HTML source. To avoid tripping these, we advise:

• Don’t use Frontpage to create the message HTML.
• Make sure the title tag doesn’t contain the word “Untitled.”
• Don’t use thick table borders.
• Don’t include a form that sends an email (a “mailto form”).
• Don’t define the content type as “TEXT/HTML” in all caps.
• Don’t have a low ratio of text to image area. Especially don’t have image-only emails, currently the number-one tactic employed by spammers to get past the filters.
• Pay careful attention to the percentage of HTML contained in the message. The assumption is that HTML = spam.
• Avoid the use of scripts, such as Javascripts.
• Don’t include any Javascript statements that open new windows.
• Avoid incorporating tracking ID numbers as much as possible.
• Do specify a character set.
• Use a white background, not a colored background.
• Do not use “invisible” text.
• Avoid red or blue textual colors - spammers’ colors of choice.

Regarding attachments:

• No attachments! Period.

Some things help convince the spam filter or email firewall that your email is personal communication, such as:

• An “In Reply To” line in the email header.
• A long signature in the message body.
• An attribution in the message body (e.g. “On Tues Jan 1, 2003 John Smith wrote:”).
• “Quoted” email text (e.g. with a “>” in front of certain lines).

Bear in mind that this whole area is a constantly moving target. Not only are the rules and threshold scores of firewalls and filters constantly changing as spammers continue to circumvent them, but the recent passage of the Can-Spam law (see “Can-Spam’s Nasty Side Effect,” bottom left) has added a new dimension to your choices of words and creative options.

Can-Spam permits unsolicited commercial email. But it requires any such emails to include “ADV” advertising tags in the subject line, a valid postal address, and a functional opt-out mechanism, among other features.

Since the sending of “unsolicited commercial email” is precisely the definition of spam, complying with the law by including ADV in the subject line - and especially leading off your subject line with ADV - is enough to cripple your unsolicited campaign before it ever leaves the gates.

The lesson? First, make sure you have either affirmative consent (verifiable opt-in records) or implied consent (proof of customer history or failure to opt out). If you do not have proof of either of these forms of consent, then you must include the prescribed tags or risk lawsuits for not complying with the law.

Of course, an alternative option is to include your postal address and unsubscribe verbiage in image form to circumvent filters. But then your ratio of images to text may well put your emails over the tipping point as well.

How to cope? Run every campaign through a predictive spam analyzer before you send it. This will not only alleviate the need to keep abreast of all these rules, it will also ensure higher deliverability and response rates. If your email deployment software does not provide this service, you can find a free spam scoring tool at www.gravitymail.com/spamscore.php.

Afterward, you’ll want to gauge the success in getting your campaign through. Certainly review open rates and click rates, but these are only indicative and not totally reliable. If your campaign is tagged as spam, you will see increased bounce rates in addition to decreased open rates.

In addition, consider signing up for 25 email accounts on Yahoo! and 25 on Hotmail and seeding your recipient list with these addresses. Be sure to intersperse them throughout your list rather than cluster them. Then, after sending your campaign, check the Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts to see how many messages got through.

Words may be the foundation of civilization, but for email marketers, they have become a minefield.

Can-Spam’s Nasty Side Effect

Direct mailers breathed a collective sigh of relief when the national Can-Spam legislation was approved in mid-December. Effective Jan. 1, it preempted California’s more restrictive permission-based email legislation. But since Can-Spam allows marketers to make the first contact and places the burden of opting out upon the recipient, it has the effect of legitimizing spam, rather than curbing it.

Although consumers can exercise their right to opt out from spam, there is nothing preventing the spammer from selling that list of unsubscribers to a fellow spammer, who has the right to make first contact, and so on down the daisy chain. As a result, we can expect the amount of spam to increase, rather than decrease. That means our reliance upon spam filters and their ability to judge an email by its cover will only increase as well.

Get Out Your Thesaurus

This list of words to avoid for fear of being caught by a spam filter is not comprehensive. There are many seedy or unseemly words and phrases that could be added to this list, but as a legitimate marketer, we assume you are not using them.

• 100%
• aging
• amazing
• best rates
• big savings
• breakthrough
• call now
• checks
• completely free
• consolidate (bills)
• coupons
• credit card
• discounts
• exercise
• for free
• forward to a friend
• free consultation/free access
• freedom
• full refund
• great offer
• guarantee/guaranteed
• income
• increase
• incredible
• investment
• limited-time only
• marketing solutions
• mobile phones
• money back
• money order
• mortgage information
• no cost
• now only
• one-time mailing
• opportunity
• opt in
• please forward
• quote (no obligation)
• refund
• remove/removed/removal
• risk free satisfaction
• save up to
• special promotion
• this is not spam
• urgent
• what are you waiting for
• win
• wrinkles
• your own

Stephan Spencer is the Founder & President of Madison, WI-based Netconcepts, a full-service emarketing agency. Brian Klais is Netconcepts’ vice president of ebusiness Services.

This article first apeared on Catalog Age in February 2004.

On the other side of the coin is opt-out, where the recipient doesn’t have the opportunity to avoid receiving your first email, only to avoid receiving subsequent emails from you. Respect your recipients’ boundaries and stick with opt-in, not opt-out.

Avoid the use of purchased lists. Many of the lists available for purchase have actually been “harvested” from web pages, newsgroup discussion posts, or domain contact information (from the “whois” database) - without the knowledge or permission of the affected individuals. On the other hand, rented lists from reputable list brokers may be worthwhile, if the list is double opt-in, fastidiously clean of unsubscribes, and finely segmented.

You can improve the odds that a user will join your list by providing numerous opt-in opportunities all with low barriers to entry. Make sure the amount of work required to sign-up is minimal. Many sites in fact only require the email address and all other personal information is optional. Place the email list sign-up on all forms on your site, including inquiry, order, and feedback forms.

On these forms, you may be tempted to have the “would you like to receive occasional special offers/newsletter via email” checkbox already checked. Checking the box by default is considered by some to be deceptive. I believe it is within ethical limits, since it still presents the prospect with the choice before they ever receive an email from you. Just make absolutely sure that this question and the checkbox are placed conspicuously on the form.

Build trust with these hand-raisers by posting a privacy policy in an obvious place. Of course this means that you will have to abide by it, with no exceptions! The privacy policy should address what you’ll be doing with the user’s information, both now and potentially in the future. Don’t think for a minute that you can revoke or weaken a privacy policy once you’ve already published it on your site, or you may end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit!

Once the hand-raisers have received your email, you’ll want to ensure that they don’t misconstrue your message as “spam” - also known as UCE or Unsolicited Commercial Email - and thus awaken the wrath of Internet vigilantes. In most respects, spam is - by its very nature - bogus. Typical spam has a bogus sender address, bogus unsubscribe instructions, and bogus offers.

Distance yourself from spammers by:

• having the email signed by a real person with real contact information

• making sure the Reply works
• reminding the recipients that they’ve given you permission to contact them, and
• providing an easy and legitimate way to unsubscribe.

This is not something to get wrong. Internet users can be downright fanatical about hunting down and punishing people who send them spam. If you are unfortunate enough to be labeled a spammer by these folks, they will come after you with unrelenting fervor, as if they have a personal vendetta against you. You could expect to receive “flames,” i.e. hate email. You may be submitted to various online blacklists of Internet advertisers. You may even have your Internet privileges revoked by your ISP.

To learn more about permission marketing, you can turn to the excellent primer Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers

OK, it’s October. So they’re a bit hazy. You haven’t thought about them since February, much less your number-one resolution for next year.
But it’s here: send only permission emails. Drill this one in. The test is in 60 days, and every wrong answer could cost you $1,000 or more.

But I’m Not a Spammer!

In case you haven’t heard, California’s new spam law prohibits the sending of unsolicited email advertisements starting January 1, 2004. While the law is aimed at spammers, its wake is rippling toward every legitimate email marketer.

Why? Because the bill takes an “opt-in” approach, similar to what the European Union has adopted. It makes it illegal for you to market to someone who a) you do NOT have a existing transactional relationship with, or b) who has NOT given you direct consent to contact.

It applies to any email address used by a resident of (or accessed from) California.

How many people does this include on your list? You’re not sure? Gulp.

This bill is very different from the smattering of legislation that the US Congress is considering, like CANSPAM. These bills take an opt-out approach — giving the marketer the right to make first contact through email but then placing the burden on the consumer to opt out if they no longer want a spammer’s spew, or the marketer’s email.

(Note: These opt-out bills would also require marketing emails contain an “ADV” tag in the subject line along with opt-out verbiage. Ironically, complying with these requirements ensures your email will be filtered as spam! See a surprising example here.

Now, before your list broker gets you suit-happy over rights violations, let the spirit of this law sink in a bit. Spam bills are passing because constituents are pushing legislators for a resolution to their inbox deluge. They want their inboxes reserved for conversations with people they know, not solicitations from people they don’t. Email is NOT direct mail. in the online world, traditional direct mail IS spam.

So if you can’t make first contact, how will you market your business with email? They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So how should you spend the next 60 days preparing to play the new game?

#1: Re-opt-in your list
This may hurt a bit, but let’s take an honest look at your email program:

Has the list been dormant for over six months?

Is your list being appended by those who think business cards equal permission?

Has your company changed identities?

Has the email deliverable itself changed recently?
If you’re not 100% sure that the names on your list have granted you permission to market them as promised, overcome your fears and re-opt-in your list. There will be many who don’t respond. They’ll be grateful you finally gave them the opportunity to get OFF your list, and they’ll quietly bid you good riddance.

If you list is pared down from 30,000 down to 12,000 names, you’ve made progress. It’s time to toss the dead weight and focus on your core.

How? It’s simple. Just ask your subscribers if they still find value in hearing from you. Click here if you do. Click here if you don’t and we’ll never bug you again.

Be smart about it, though: include this re-opt message in your most useful email ever. Remember, your goal is to win them over again. Come to think of it, isn’t that what each email should be built to do?

#2: Deactivate forwarding
Such blasphemous talk from an email ASP? Yes. The reason is that most software programs handle forwards by sending the email from your server, or from your vendor’s.

But think about it: do you have their permission to send this email to them? No. The friend has the relationship and can assume the risk. But you can’t.

Besides, isn’t it still easier to use your own email forward button? Hello, my Netscape program has cool advanced 1998 features like auto-filled names (ooh!) and it lets me send to MULTIPLE friends at once (ahh!).

And I don’t have to wonder whether I just signed my friend up for something they don’t want. (Bonus!)

Of course, when you rely on natural forwards, you forfeit the ability to track the recipient. But there’s nothing you can do with that address besides spamming it anyhow. It also means less control over the forwarded layout. So adapt:

Simplify your html design with fewer graphics or complicated layouts.

Provide an active subscription form INSIDE your email.

Embed tracking codes so you know who referred him when he does sign up.

Precious few newsletters or email promotions are worthy of going viral anymore. But the objective remains to encourage recipients to evangelize for you. You can still facilitate, track and reward this behavior, without the invasive “forward to friend” link.

#3: Go organic
One of the greatest untapped opportunities lies in optimizing your Web site for signups.

Let’s take an inventory:
Is your signup form visible on every page of your site? A good place for this is on the left or right columns near the top. Most people don’t scroll, so don’t make them work to find it.

Does your signup have sufficient persuasion engineering? No, I’m afraid “sign up for our newsletter” doesn’t cut it. People are busy and deluged already. What are you offering that I can’t get anywhere else? Special deals? New thinking? Essays? Tips? There must be an equal exchange if you want to converse with me.

Is your signup integrated into your Web site’s functionality? Whether downloading a paper, registering or purchasing, visitors should be given opportunities to subscribe to your list at every interaction point.

Do you tout a winning privacy policy? There’s nothing wrong with, “We promise not to share your information with anyone. Period.” In fact, people get suspicious if you don’t assert such bold promises. They are scared to part with their information. Why hide behind legal mumbo-jumbo? Can they trust you or not? A clear policy that asserts, “Yes, you can” makes it easy to subscribe.

Are you leveraging your Web site traffic? You will grow your list fast if your Web site is built to be friendly to Google, which along with its syndicate partners (AOL and Yahoo) will send lots of qualified visitors that cost you nothing. These visitors may not buy now, but they’ll sign up if they are interested in you. The best part is you’re not paying per click.

Are you double-opting-in? This practice has waned in popularity of late with the growing resistance toward sharing personal information. But without this protection, unscrupulous competitors and pranksters are free to hit you where it hurts, time and again, on account of the law. Consider yourself warned.

#4: Leave an audit trail
People forget they registered with you — especially if they haven’t heard from you in a while. Plan for challenges and disputes with ISPs. When people subscribe, stamp their database record with a date. If they raise a stink about your emails, you have a record.

Granted, someone may question the authenticity of your electronic evidence. But a clearly implemented policy for all subscribers will strengthen your position. This trail should include information such as where they signed up from (e.g., the Web site), a transaction, email, as well as the date of their double-opt-in, if implemented.

#5: Select strategic partners
Chances are somebody already has permission to market to the people you want to market to. Your objective is not to figure out how little you can spend for that list. After all, those people still don’t know you! Your challenge is to find partners who will let you piggyback on their goodwill and credibility to introduce you to these friends of theirs.

Ideally, you would like the partner to send an email introducing you to their audience. Once your foot is in the front door, this email should provide a compelling offer that persuades the recipient to opt-in to your messages. It takes some ingenuity — but hey, now they’re on your list.

Look for associations, verticals, publishers or complementing businesses you can build a partnership with. Can you provide valuable content they could share? Can you combine lists? (Be careful here!) How can you scratch their back in return?

Conclusion
California’s law isn’t perfect. List brokers and others will likely challenge and may succeed in convincing the courts to overturn it. But if that happens, and we find ourselves relying on less effective opt-out legislation, email as a communications channel will continue to implode under its own increasing deliverability difficulties and filtering unpredictability. Soon email would cease to be a marketing opportunity.

So, my advice?

Don’t fight it. It won’t stop spam, but it WILL help clean up the gray area where corporate America has been dabbling for far too long. And it has the potential to advance email marketing to a more creative level than just purchasing lists and firing away. It is time we learn how to speak the language of the inbox, to have multiple conversations simultaneously while advancing individual relationships, and naturally inviting more people to share in your conversation.

Maybe then technology like digital keys and collaborative filtering tools will be able to reward legitimate marketers who deliver value while casting both real and perceived spammers into the trash bin where they belong.

As for me and my inbox, we can hardly wait for 2004 to arrive. Will you be ready?

CIO Magazine, in its WebBusiness Insights e-newsletter made the mistake of saying, “We honour all removal requests”. The New York Times in its “News Tracker” service specifies the message’s content type as “TEXT/HTML” in caps instead of lower case. Intuit, in a recent QuickBooks promotion in the US, sent the campaign from an email address that included the word “offers”. Seems harmless, but such things determine whether or not your email gets through to the intended recipients.

Typically, the way these filters and firewalls work is with tests that assign a number of points to your email. Your message is run through each of these tests before it is delivered to the recipient. If the cumulative score reaches a certain threshold, your email is binned.

In most cases you’ll never know the message wasn’t delivered, although some filters or firewalls will send a “bounce” reply making it appear that the recipient’s account has been closed.

Your email message can also have points deducted. Losing points is a good thing, since you want to avoid reaching the threshold at which your message is considered spam. For example, if your message contains “quoted” email text from a previous message, you can score a fair number of negative points.

To avoid the email black hole, try these measures:

• Avoid spammy-sounding words like opportunity, incredible, targeted, and offer, and phrases like save up to, big savings, full refund, limited time only, money back, credit card, satisfaction guaranteed, no cost, now only, for free, opt in, or please forward.
• Avoid language that states the recipient was on a list, registered at your site or with one of your marketing partners, or opted in. Don’t claim your message isn’t spam, that you obtained the recipient’s address legitimately, that the recipient may have received the email by mistake, or that you respect all removal requests.
• Don’t explain why the recipient is receiving your offer.
• Include a real name in the “From” address, not just an email address.
• Never include in the subject line words like now only, hello, free, buy, or exclamation marks, white space, strings of numbers, or words in all caps.
• Don’t send attachments. Even if your email message gets through, the attachment will often be stripped.
• If sending an HTML email, specify a character set, include a title, and employ text (not just images). Stay away from coloured backgrounds, JavaScripts, and thick table borders.
• Send your email campaign to several test accounts and see if they get through.

But remember this whole area is a constantly moving target. The threshold scores of firewalls and filters keep changing as spammers continue to find ways around them.

By Stephan Spencer. This article first appeared on Unlimited in August 2003.

No, not colossal advertising budgets, but viral marketing: a great (or, in the case of HotOrNot, a silly but highly contagious) idea that aficionados simply had to tell their friends about, and those friends in turn told other friends. But triggering a word-of-mouth epidemic isn’t as easy as it may seem.

Earlier this year, the Auckland chapter of Sales and Marketing Executives International (www.smei.co.nz) experimented with its first viral marketing campaign to promote workshops by an internationally renowned guerrilla-marketing guru - with only moderate success.

However, there are some ways to improve your chances:

• Target those sympathetic to your cause. For example, a current BMW owner is much more likely to be a BMW evangelist than a Ford owner is.
• Like-minded people hang out together. If you want more affluent customers, go after your existing affluent customers: they mix in the same circles. Target the "connectors" — those people who seem to know everybody.
• Reward those who spread the word. Don’t insist that a referrer’s friend become a customer in order for an incentive to be earned. The incentive doesn’t have to be expensive - a golfer would value golf balls with their name printed on them, for example.
• Make it easy and obvious for people to “pass it on”. Ask the recipients of your email newsletter to forward it to anyone they think may be interested. On your web site, include a “Tell a Friend” or "Email this page to a friend" button that sends articles, reviews, product info or anything else of potential interest. Consider offering a fill-in form where a visitor could send something valuable to a number of friends at once (see the “Send It” page on www.ideavirus.com as an example).
• Asking people to forward messages should not be a blatant, in-your-face demand but an informal invitation, and it should not smack of commercialism or spam. A good offline example would be a book that includes a blank postcard with a funny cartoon referencing the book and its topic.

Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and business consultant Paul Watkins’s web site (www.paulwatkins.co.nz) are invaluable sources of tips. Check them out for more viral marketing ideas. Interestingly, Godin took a leaf out of his own book, employing viral marketing to make Unleashing the Ideavirus the most downloaded e-book in history.

Stephan Spencer is founder/president of Netconcepts, a Madison, WI-based Web marketing agency that offers search optimization services.

This article first appeared in the September 2002 issue of Unlimited magazine.

But the book also contains examples of New Zealand companies getting good results from email marketing campaigns. For example, a Bank of New Zealand email campaign soliciting credit card applications got a 9% response rate (the same as a direct marketing campaign sent at the same time), but the email campaign used only 15% of the budget . At the other end of the size scale, Mayo-Smith’s local garage significantly increased warrant-of-fitness turnover just by asking customers for their email addresses and then sending out reminder emails. There are some ground rules for good email marketing. Try these:

• Get permission. Don’t buy or rent lists of email addresses. Include simple unsubscribe instructions, then abide by users’ wishes if they opt-out.
• Work at your subject line. It should have a good call to action or value proposition. Use the subject line to satisfy the recipients’ needs and appeal to their interests. Consider including their first name.
• Make it easy: easy to unsubscribe, to offer feedback or to place an order by phone, email or online. Make sure if recipients hit “Reply”, it doesn’t come straight back to them marked “Undeliverable”.
• Distance yourself from spammers, weasels selling weight loss and Nigerian scam merchants. Put your name or your company’s name in the ‘From’ line, not ‘Here it is’ or ‘’. Sign your email with a real person’s name. Address it to the person you want to receive it, not to ‘undisclosed recipients’.
• Write compelling copy. Make the email short and sweet so that it can be scanned easily. Make judicious use of links, including one to your privacy policy page (you do have one, don’t you?) where you reassure subscribers you won’t share their details with third parties. Make the message look good: a poorly designed email begets poor results.
• Track everything: click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, “open” rates (meaning that they viewed your email) and, most importantly, conversion rates, where you’ve successfully converted recipients into customers.
• Test, test, test! Test the offer, the “Subject” line, the “From” line, the message copy, the layout, the message length, the timing and the contact frequency. Set up a control group and experimental groups, where you vary just one element per group. Pay particular attention to the contact frequency, particularly if it’s a regular mailing like an email newsletter.

Stephan Spencer is founder/president of Netconcepts, a Madison, WI-based Web marketing agency that offers search optimization services.

This article first appeared on Unlimited in June 2002.