Marketing e-mail has become a disgrace. My in-box is floodedwith e-mail that assumes I am broke, overweight, a degenerate, andnot the man I used to be. The online public and its legislators areoutraged by all this spam. Corporate America is spending millionson spam filters; states are passing aggressive and restrictive spamlaws. We all agree it is a problem. Yet as business people andtechnologists, we also know e-mail is a cost-effective way to reachcustomers and potential customers. Your organization may not bedirectly involved in sending bulk e-mails, but Ill wager someone upor down your food chain is.

As of press time, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission had theauthority to enforce the national Do Not Call Registry. Even if thecourts overturn this legislation, the average consumer is so sickof telemarketers that the telephone may no longer be a viable meansof marketing. Direct mail marketing has become cost prohibitive andless effective. Whats left? E-mail. Like it or not, e-mailmarketing is a valuable business toolboth in the B2B and B2Cmarketplace. That e-mail may be coming from the home office, or anagency, or an agent. The source doesnt really matter. What doesmatter is an e-mail carrying your companys branding is touchingcustomers or prospects, and you need to make certain your e-mail isnot identified as spam. E-mail doesnt even need to carry amarketing message to be considered spam. The phrase unsolicitedbulk e-mail often may connote a marketing or sales pitch, but itjust as easily could be a piece of corporate communication or anewsletter.

Spam: Its Better Fried
What is spam? Its the general term used for unsolicited bulk e-mail(UBE) or unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). You see thecommonality here? Un-solicitedif you didnt ask for it, you arebeing spammed! Although some recipients will call anymarketing e-mail spam, generally accepted usage does not identifymarketing e-mail as spam if the recipient has an establishedbusiness or other relation with the marketer. If you haveregistered on a Web site for some service, there is a good chanceyou (perhaps inadvertently) identified yourself as someone willingto receive e-mail. There are a thousand different ways to get on ane-mail list. And once you are on a legitimate list (at least oneyou perceive as legitimate), there is a very good chance you willland on a thousand lists.

Businesses regularly sell or rent their customer lists. Once youre-mail address has been sold or rented, you might as well assumeevery nefarious spam house in the universe has it. Professionallist sellers and resellers have a much different idea of opt-in andopt-out than you or I do. If you havent threatened to kidnap theirfirst-born unless you are removed from their lists, resellersassume you are an opt-in. I have seen rented lists spammed by areseller with opt-out instructions that were impossible to read orinterpret. The list then is offered to other marketers as aguaranteed opt-in list.

Opt-In Only
If your organization or someone representing your organization isgoing to send bulk e-mails, it is absolutely essential you sendthat e-mail only to true opt-ins. My definition of true opt-ins areindividuals who have provided you with their e-mail and given youpermission to provide them with information or marketing materials.Once individuals receive that e-mail, they should be sent aconfirmation e-mail with explicit instructions stating somethinglike: You have registered on the XYZ Web site and requested toreceive information on variable life insurance plans. If this iscorrect, please click here to verify this information and youre-mail address. If users dont click through, they should not beconsidered as an opt-in target. There you goa simple, virtuallyfoolproof procedure. Your buddy cant sign you up for advertisingfrom the Sock of the Month Club without having your verification ofthe first e-mail.

There are numerous reasons you should market only to opt-ins. Themost obvious reason is it is the law in some states. Californiajust passed (September 24, 2003) a very scary statute that providesfor fines of up to $1 million for violations. This law will becontested as will other antispam laws. Some of these laws will beoverturned. But that shouldnt affect us as responsible businessesusing technology to market to our customers. We should welcome thestrict antispam laws in the hope they eventually will drive out theirresponsible purveyors of undesirable spam. Our self-imposed rulesshould be stricter than any state law. I dont need the Larry Flyntsof this world ensuring the continuation of my First Amendmentrights. And I dont need offshore spammers hiring attorneys todefend my rights to market effectively to my customers.

They Are Our Customers
The real issue isnt the law. The real issue is maintaining a goodimage with your customers and prospective customers. Nobody likesspam. Make sure the people you e-mail dont perceive your offeringsas spam. Even after the first double opt-in, every opt-in youprovide your customers should have an obvious and easy way to optout or unsubscribe. It is a good idea to have multiple opt-outmethods. Some users hit the reply button and type in unsubscribe.Others just will hit reply and send the mail right back at you.Your system needs to act on those replies. The action may benothing more than forwarding that reply to a customer servicerepresentative for response, but something has to be done. Thecustomer has sent you a signact on it. As technical folk, we tendto take e-mail as second nature, as a logical extension of othermeans of communication. Dont make the assumption that just becauseit makes sense to you, it will make sense to most of your users.Send your mother a sample and see if she can opt out withoutcalling for help. If it passes the mom test, it probably is apretty good system.

Without proper metrics, we are unable to judge the effectiveness ofany advertising campaign. There are a few unique tracking methodsavailable to e-mail marketers:
You can track bounces, which are e-mails that are not delivered fora variety of reasons (bad e-mail address, refusal of the e-mail,etc.). Bounced e-mails provide a great opportunity to contactcustomers via another method to verify their e-mail address.
Much e-mail is designed to track reads. This is not an accuratemetric, although it is useful. Reads generally are tracked byplacing a field in an HTML e-mail that fetches a hidden token froma server. When this token is retrieved, that event is logged andmarked as a read. This does not mean an e-mail actually was openedand read by the recipient. Most e-mail clients have a preview panethat displays the contents of an e-mail before it is opened. If thepreview fetches the token, it will be logged as a read. Somefirewall utilities also will render false positives. Third-partyvendors that deliver bulk e-mails use these methods andoccasionally mislead users into thinking some specific number ofe-mails from a particular campaign actually were read. You need tobe very careful in interpreting read numbers. They are probablymost useful when interpreted as a relative trend from one campaignto the next. On the other hand, if your reads go from 50 percent to5 percent, you safely can assume everyone is flagging your e-mailas unwanted and deleting it before it has a chance to beread.
Click-throughs are the best way to track effectiveness. Typicallyyou might offer a special incentive for a user to click through toa special item. Those click-throughs are tracked easily and canprovide an excellent metric. An e-mail campaign describing a wholelife policy may click through to a Web site where sample rates aredisplayed. The identity of the user who clicked through isrecorded.

I Played by the Rules, but . . .
You may be sending a valuable e-newsletter to a carefully selectedgroup of double opt-in customers. Some of these customers may beusing AOL. Those customers decide they no longer want to receiveyour newsletter and start clicking the report spam button on AOL.Before you know it, you could be identified as a spammer at AOL. Iimagine it takes more than a couple of report spam clicks at AOL totrigger this, but it can happen. Now you cant send any e-mail toany of your AOL customers, and you are in trouble. A similarscenario could take place with any Internet service provider. I useAOL as an example because it is everywhere and easy to pickon.
You even may be reported as a spammer on one of the antispam sitessuch as www.spamcop.net. Thatorganization provides various lists and services used bycorporations to filter out spam. There are procedures by which youare able to contest your identification as a spammer and, ifsuccessful, get removed from the spammer lists. So what? You reallydont want to be in a position of proving you are not a spammer. Youneed to monitor your e-mail activities carefully so that you neverget to that point.

Chances are if you become identified as a spammer, you are markedby the mail server IP address. All e-mail from that IP will beblocked. You better hope your corporate mail isnt using that sameIP address. If you get busted again, your entire range of IPaddresses may get marked. It also is possible your domain name(biginsurancecompany.com) may be flagged as a spammer. These allare obviously things you dont want to happen. You can prevent themby, first, carefully controlling all outgoing bulk e-mail and,second, establishing and enforcing strict corporate policy onmailing lists.

Truth Is Out There, or Is It?
Like most things in the world today, perception is reality. Youdont have to be bulk e-mailing distasteful marketing junk from athird-party e-mailing house to be perceived as a spammer. Zealousindividuals in your organization may be sending useful corporatecommunications through your regular mail server by pasting a listof recipients into the BCC: box in their mail client. Those bulkcommunications could be interpreted as spam by some individuals aswell as commercial spam filters (multiple BCC addresses is atypical red flag for spam). That probably wont get you busted by anISP, but it easily could lead to being marked as a spammer by anindividual firm or organization.

The use of suspect keywords in a subject line may cause your e-mailto be flagged as spam and thus nondelivery. See how many of youre-mails make it through spam filters if you use the word free inthe subject line. Even your server configuration may flag you as aspammer. Some ISP and corporate filters require that reverse DNS beenabled for your mail servers so that your valid domain name can bematched up with the IP address. AT&T WorldNet had to back downfrom that procedure after users started complaining about theirinability to receive legitimate e-mail. The point is there is nofoolproof method to ensure the e-mail you send wont be flagged asspam by some ISP or some user or some filters.

First, Do No Harm
Be aware of state and federal legislation regarding e-mail (trywww.spamlaws.com). As I saidbefore, we are not an industry that should be dancing around thelimits of the law, but the laws do provide us with solid guidelinesfor acceptable usage. Adopt enforceable corporate policy forcontrol of e-mail lists and bulk e-mail. If you must e-mail liststhat are not opt-ins, follow the guidelines and include ADV in thesubject line. Dont sell or rent your e-mail lists unless you haveobtained permission to do so (unlikely). Clearly state yourcorporate spam and privacy policies on your Web sites. Obtainingand retaining customers is a difficult task these days. Dont risklosing them by being perceived as a spammer.