CRM - January 2009 - (Page 35)

EMAIL MARKETING button to flag an unwelcome email. Despite the aggressive measures to block “real” spam, users are conditioned to hit that button to get rid of any unwanted email. In a September 2008 report, JupiterResearch found that approximately 25 percent of consumers hit “Report Spam” to opt out of emails they’d subscribed to. Unfortunately, the report continues, “complaint rates are driven by consumers using the spam button to unsubscribe—a habit they show no sign of stopping.” To counter that, some experts advise marketers to have their opt-out link near the “Report Spam” button to encourage recipients to choose the less-brutal option. The Worst Email Maneuvers We asked marketers and industry pundits to name the most terrible moves in email marketing. >> The first worst thing you can do is mix up your acquisition and retention list on the same system…. That’s going to ding your complaint rate and it’s going to make you get less delivered…. You can fail to unsubscribe people when they complain—that’s not only a bad idea, that’s illegal. The third thing you can do, frankly, is not take a look at all the technology out there to improve. [Finally], you can not be constantly testing and testing and testing and seeing what works. REPUTATION AND AUTHENTICATION If you do get blocked, it could be your content, but the more likely culprit is your reputation, says Bill Wagner, executive vice president of business operations at on-premises email service provider StrongMail.“What do [the ISPs] care about?” he asks. “They don’t care that a message is coming from Charles Schwab…. What they care about is maintaining their client inboxes [and] protecting their clients with those accounts…. They care about reputation as it’s perceived by the owner of the mailbox.” Current adoption of email reputation management (ERM) best practices, however, remains low. Daniels reports that only 35 percent of marketers report implementing Sender Policy Framework, Sender Identification Framework (Sender-ID), and DomainKeys Identified Mail, with an additional 10 percent to 12 percent planning to do so in the next 12 months. (See “Three Levels of Email Authentication,” page 36.) Barry Abel, vice president of operations for Message Systems, compares the current attitude toward authentication to the conundrum of the chicken and the egg:“Why authenticate if I’m not sure the ISPs are checking?” Soon, senders may no longer have a choice. Daniels anticipates that by the second quarter of 2009, if a sender’s address is not authenticated, it won’t just be more-carefully screened—it will be immediately dropped. Inevitably, efforts to keep the “bad guys” out have also made it more difficult for the “good guys” to get in. “As far as deliverability goes, the biggest challenge for marketers is managing the ISPs’ ever-changing rules…[and] changing their threshold of complaints,” Mullen says, but for good reason: “They do it to stay one step ahead of the spammers.” An email marketer herself, Mullen empathizes with her peers’ frustrations. It’d be great to have a rulebook—what works, what doesn’t—but it’s not practical.“If [ISPs] did that, obviously the spammers would have a field day,” she says. All marketers can really do is send out their messages and carefully monitor what’s getting delivered. “One day, for one of your 700 clients, you’ll notice that their emails to Yahoo! didn’t make it through—and so you need to identify why,” Mullen says. As a result, getting blacklisted is just the nature of the beast. “Every large emailer at some point in time will be blacklisted, even if they follow all the best practices,” Mullen says. When that www.destinationCRM.com —DAVID ATLAS, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF WORLDWIDE MARKETING AND SALES, GOODMAIL SYSTEMS >> Never assume that just because you got permission, (a) that you’re going to get delivered; and (b) that you’re not a spammer…. Way too many marketers capture that permission but then send stuff that’s inconsistent with the notice they gave to consumers when they signed up, or they’re just sending too much of it…. How you give notice always trumps how you get permission. —JORDAN COHEN, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF INDUSTRY RELATIONS, GOODMAIL SYSTEMS >> If your customers are not receiving the messages they want at the frequency they’re expecting, then they’re not going to be your customers, they’re not going to want your messages, they’re going to report it as spam, and ISPs owe it to their customers to stop those. —CHARLES STILES, CO-VICE CHAIR, THE MESSAGING ANTI-ABUSE WORKING GROUP >> Coming into the office, even though we check emails at 6 a.m. on our BlackBerrys, we still have another 123 emails later to check, so you’ve got to deal with [email] fatigue. Just because other people are sending a lot of emails doesn’t give you the excuse to send more…. If you’re going to increase your frequency in a tough economic time like this, you’d better be increasing the value and relevance of your emails. —SIMMS JENKINS, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, BRIGHTWAVE MARKETING, AND AUTHOR OF THE TRUTH ABOUT EMAIL MARKETING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 35 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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