MediaPost Publications My 2008 Email Wish List: Grasp Reality 01/03/2008

	ADVANCED SEARCH
Home > Email Insider

My 2008 Email Wish List: Grasp Reality

by Loren McDonald, Thursday, January 3, 2008, 2:00 AM

SHARE

TOOLS
PRINT COMMENT	SUBSCRIBE RSS

TAGS: Email

MOST READ

The Christmas wish lists at my home have been fulfilled: a Wii for my daughters, a remodeled kitchen for my wife, Guitar Hero for me -- er, the girls, I mean. Now, here's my wish list for the email industry in 2008:

ISPs require authentication. You might groan at having to jump through another coding hoop, but email authentication is good for the industry because it cuts down on phishing and enables ISPs to do a better job identifying fraudulent senders.

The problem is, the ISPs have not yet made authentication a requirement. Thus, a legitimate sender who has authenticated is not rewarded for its efforts but in fact is penalized if the authentication records are set up incorrectly.

Marketers finally face inbox reality. I've been preaching the need for email marketers to redesign their emails so that they are more usable and enable subscribers to scan and take the action you want, regardless of email client, preview pane and image blocking. But so many companies continue to ignore the most basic of inbox rendering practices, out of either ignorance or laziness.

Just the other day an email from my favorite well-known jewelry store arrived in my Gmail inbox with the Google ads on top of the email instead of along the side. The email was simply too wide -- this company ignored the most basic of rendering best practices.

Email marketing manages all corporate email processes. Most companies divide up outbound email among departments: IT (transactional emails); customer support (customer-focused newsletters); and human resources (employee newsletters).

I wish corporate departments would relinquish control of these and other email programs to their internal email marketing experts to ensure emails are coordinated across the enterprise, designed and managed for deliverability, support the brand strategy and achieve better results through a higher level of execution.

Batch-and-blasters do the right math. I'm tired of hearing the cliché that batch-and-blast works because email is cheap and the ROI can be high. Let's finally acknowledge that email is not digital direct mail. The rules and the math are different.

Pounding away at your list might actually cost you money. When you factor in list churn (increased spam complaints, unsubscribes and bounces), more disaffected subscribers and the cost to reacquire these lost customers, your short-term revenue increase could turn to a deficit in 12 to 18 months.

Email senders see deliverability as an opportunity, not a challenge. I wish marketers would stop complaining about deliverability challenges and embrace deliverability as an opportunity to get a leg up on their competitors. Correct the problems that get your emails blocked or diverted to the spam folder. Your reward is a place in the inbox, a spot denied to competitors who don't clean up their email acts.

Email and/or marketing associations work together to solve big-kahuna issues. The email marketing industry is chock full of acronym-laden organizations: DMA, DMA-EEC, ESPC, MAWWG, AOTA, etc. I wish a cross-association working group would form to enable these associations to agree on some common charters and focus areas. We would be more effective by working together on a couple of broad issues, then divide and conquer on the smaller issues.

The first project could be the next item on my list:

The email industry reaches consensus on email standards This encourages self-regulation to boost our reliability and reputation among consumers, ISPs and lawmakers. While I believe the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S. has been an important element of the industry's continued health, it probably did not go far enough.

Regardless of your views on regulation, the best way to stave off onerous legislation is to clean up our own act. Stopping large-scale spammers and phishers will continue to challenge law enforcement and IT innovation; I'm more worried about large-scale marketers who deploy questionable tactics under the guise of getting a solid ROI and who hurt email's reputation for those that do understand that customers are, in fact, in control.

What are your email marketing wishes for 2008?

Meet Loren McDonald at Email Insider Summit Utah!

Loren McDonald will be there speaking during "Looking Past Email Measurement" on December 09 at 9:45 AM. Top executives will be there. Will you?
Register today and save.

This commentary is insightful. I recommend it to others.

6 comments on "My 2008 Email Wish List: Grasp Reality"

Tony Greasy from Greasytonys

commented on: January 04, 2008 at 4:40 AM

I concur wholeheartedly. especially about deliverability and email format & design.
So many brands will obey and work to different sets of guidelines and ISP will do the same, how can anyone deliberately get email marketing right with so much contradiction. So many organisations have done so many different things in the fight against spam that they are causing more false positives than ever!
The required format of emails in many levels is not complicated so to speak it is just so varied and and at some levels ambiguous that designers are just not inclined to spend the time trying to satisfy every email client especially now that many of the main web clients have moved to a web 2.0 interface and Outlook 2007 has become even more restrictive. The rules keep changing and while it is understandable that spam filters and the rendering in email clients make the designer have to work hard because the spammer won't, it gets to a point when there is too much being asked!
Jennifer Norene from Generous Marketing

commented on: January 03, 2008 at 2:08 PM

That companies like Microsoft that build email clients would work collaboratively with the email marketing industry. Their tools so aggressively fight spam that they take out decent, wanted emails from reputable firms.
I agree about centralizing email under the email marketing experts, usually found in marketing. Thanks for the great post.
Jennifer
http://generousmarketing.typepad.com/junctiongen/
Jessica Satterfield from The Satterfield Agency

commented on: January 03, 2008 at 1:09 PM

W.R. Max Bendel,
I disagree with your assertion that e-mail is exactly like direct mail. While most people don't like junk mail they receive at their homes, they can't hit "unsubscribe" or "mark as spam" to hurt the sender's reputation and deliverability for future mailings. Also, when a snail mailer "bounces," it comes back to the sender, but doesn't prevent you from sending another mailer again.
E-mail is totally different -- Your reputation is everything, and if your list isn't clean, you could be hurting your chances of making it to the inbox next time.
Jessica Satterfield www.TheSatterfieldAgency.com
Peter Simmons from UnsubCentral

commented on: January 03, 2008 at 11:40 AM

Loren - Excellent article many of our corporate clients are reaching out to us to help them co-ordinate their email streams. Companies realize that having a consistent message/frequency/value proposition across all email streams increases customer acquisition, retention and cross-sell - upsell
The days of "email blasts" are gone - consistent value relationships (started and maintained by email) are the foundation for profitable business
W.R. Max Bendel from Marketing Partners

commented on: January 03, 2008 at 8:30 AM

1. Obviously Loren doesn't know anything about direct mail. 2, Email is exactly like direct mail if you want to get a response.
Mark Brownlow from Email Marketing Reports

commented on: January 03, 2008 at 4:53 AM

Great article and reality check Loren! I agree that standards would be helpful. But the real trick will be getting them implemented.
There has been tacit consensus on many best practices for years, but that doesn't stop people ignoring list hygiene issues, assuming permission where it was never given etc.
My wish would be for the industry to find some way of reaching those who do *not* eat and drink email marketing, and getting these folk to understand how to grow, nurture and use an email list responsibly and effectively.
I'm not overly optimistic this will happen. In which case, it wouldn't suprise me if legislators stepped in...

You must be signed in to comment. Sign In

Do you have strong opinions and inside knowledge about the topic of this article -- and do you want to share your insights, observations and points of view regularly with the readers of MediaPost? To be considered as a MediaPost contributing writer, please send pertinent info about your credentials, plus several column ideas and one example of your writing on the topic, to pfine@mediapost.com. Please see our editorial guidelines here first.

LOREN MCDONALD

Loren McDonald is vice president of industry relations for Silverpop, a leading provider of engagement marketing solutions for both BtoC and BtoB marketers.

AUTHORS

» MediaPost Publications Masthead

6 comments on "My 2008 Email Wish List: Grasp Reality"

Leave a Comment