• by Ross Fadner , November 3, 2003

Email marketing strategists Monday urged direct marketing planners to exercise greater tact in an effort to minimize perceptions of shiftiness that have begun to surround the industry. Prudence was the pervading tone set by a panel of email marketing gurus during Monday's session of the Ad: Tech New York conference.

The cautionary note comes amid a growing and fervent consumer backlash against all forms of spam and, according to these experts, marketers must now more than ever distinguish themselves from the expanding throng of illegitimate mass emailers.

"It's important that the tone be more of collaboration instead of 'buy me now!'" said Susan Goodman, chairman-CEO of Goodman & Co., adding that building an atmosphere of trust is paramount to reaching today's skeptical, spam-weary consumer.

Goodman also noted the success of integrated campaigns that have employed direct email marketing as a subtle, supplementary means of reaching a targeted audience, such as Gap.com's highly successful, viral marketing strategy for the "Missy and Madonna" campaign.

Staying in respectful contact with Web site subscribers was highlighted by David Dickey, director of marketing & communications, direct and new initiatives at Sprint PCS, as another means of generating positive response rates to new offers. Dickey reflected positively on Sprint's acquisition of 5 million email addresses out of 19 million total customers. He stressed the importance of keeping frequent-but not too frequent-contact with each one of them. "Once you get people to raise their hands, if you frequently get in touch with them, you can raise response rates," he said.

The most entertaining and insightful panel presentation belonged to Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal, an email marketing strategic consulting firm. Sernovitz declared that direct marketers no longer can get away with "the bad and the ugly" in terms of their marketing plans, because today's consumers wouldn't for a nanosecond consider opening a file in their inbox that has even the slightest hint of spam. "Marketers can't get away with the ugly and the average anymore, because today's consumers are pickier than ever. If a consumer deletes nine out of ten emails because he thinks he's receiving spam, then you want to be the only one left," he said.

Sernovitz also laid out a set of best practices for marketers to follow to maximize email campaign effectiveness. During the presentation he mapped out a series of warning signs for possible underachievement, followed by their solutions. Among the key questions he asked: Is your list size proportionate to the number of subscribers to your site? Do you lose as many subscribers as you convert? Are your emails disappearing into the gaping spam filter void? Sernovitz offered some relatively innovative strategies for avoiding these problems, such as having an opt-in link to your newsletter(s) on each page of a company Web site, or avoiding bold pronouncements on outgoing headers such as "SPECIAL OFFER!" or "FREE..."

Lastly, Sernovitz stressed the importance of mailing from an ESP and not from an individual address to avoid being blocked out by aggressive filters. "If you're not proactively dealing with this then you could be losing 18-20 percent of your potential reach," he said. This way, he concluded, your marketing message won't be lost in the dead letter office of filtered email.