E-mail Marketing Losing Ground, Spam Blamed

PARK CITY, UTAH--E-mail marketing is losing ground. That's largely a result of overly aggressive anti-spam efforts that have effectively blocked legitimate marketing emails, according to email marketing executives who spoke Monday at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit.

"It's not working quite as well as it used to, and the trend is a little disturbing," admits Denis McGrath, interactive marketing manager for Procter & Gamble. "We were doing better a couple years ago. The smart marketers have got to be asking: 'What's it going to be in the future?'"

McGrath and other executives cite several reasons why consumers no longer respond to marketing e-mails at the same rates as in the past. But the major culprit is the mistaken reporting of legitimate email as spam.

When consumers report messages as spam, Internet service providers and email service providers sometimes classify the company that sent the message as a spammer--which means they refuse to deliver future emails from that company.

Another setback is a lack of communication within big companies.

"We are our own worst enemies in terms of our different groups thinking they own the individual e-mail contact," says Syd Jones, senior manager of worldwide demand generation and emarketing for IBM. He adds that some groups refuse to enter an email address into the company's mail database, because they're afraid someone else at the company will send spam to that in-box.

Daryl Neilson, e-communications WW program manager for Hewlett-Packard, adds that some product groups "think they own the customers."

To further complicate the problem, senior executives at the vice-president level don't understand the technical details or importance of research, segmentation and deliverability. That failing discourages the investment needed to solve problems in all three areas, say Neilson and Jones.

E-mails that are delivered don't solicit the same response that they used to, says Brian Ellefritz, director of global customer relationship marketing for Cisco Systems. He adds that the early hope of using email to "close the marketing loop"--with delivery leading to consumer action--isn't being realized.

The irony is that email is lagging at the same time that a host of new Web services, such as social networks, blogs, video file-sharing, RSS and podcasts, are proliferating. "Everyone's talking about Web 2.0," Ellefritz says. "Where's our E-mail 2.0?"

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