• by Ross Fadner , June 16, 2004

In the wake of this week's decision by the Federal Trade Commission against deploying a Do-Not-Email list, panelists at the JupiterMedia Internet Planet conference in New York Wednesday were left to ponder the industry's alternatives to the war on spam.

Laurel Robinson, director of outbound marketing solutions, CNET Networks, said the industry needs to focus on authentication standards. "There is definitely an emerging market for reputation services," she said, noting that CNET uses Bonded Sender, a program that requires bulk email marketers to put up a bond, which guarantees marketers delivery to all Bonded Sender clients provided that the emailer adheres to CanSpam and other stated stipulations.

Robinson added that Bonded Sender's recent deal with Microsoft establishes them as the reputation services leader, covering about 25-30 percent of the world's inboxes. All the panelists agreed that reputation services were the appropriate route to follow. "We definitely think there will be a standard authentication adopted by the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers)," Robinson said.

"We're quickly approaching a light at the end of this tunnel," David Daniels, research director for JupiterResearch, optimistically noted, but added that misguided consumer complaints still present one of the industry's biggest issues. "One thing to keep in mind," he said, "is that all complaints are not created equal."

Melissa Shaw, principal of strategic services for email optimization firm Responsys Inc., stressed best practices to assuage the consumer complaint problem, but also noted that many major email providers have "overly aggressive" spam policies.

"The threshold ISPs and major spam providers set for spam complaints is really, really low," Shaw said. "They give email marketers a shelf that they have to hit." She noted that these major players are not giving legitimate marketers a means by which to prove themselves, when often times lazy consumers simply report email they don't want to open as spam.

CNET's Robinson urged email marketers to provide a clear and easy one-click unsubscribe. She said marketers that don't do this run the risk of consumer impatience which could result in a spam report.

In the wake of the CanSpam Act, one marketing director noted that it seems as though ISPs are only getting stricter. Yesterday, Travelocity.com Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Glueck pointed out that America Online now classifies bulk emails that have open rates of less than 0.2 percent as spam, and effectively blocks all mail from the same sender thenceforth. Glueck called the policy 'very strict,' but was uncertain whether that policy applied to everyone in AOL's sender database.

The panelists agreed that email marketing is not quite as simple-or as cheap--as it used to be. Responsys' Shaw underlined the increasing importance of analytics. "There is a renewed focus on best practices and a much heavier emphasis on analytics which has introduced so many more variables to email marketing."

Loren MacDonald, VP marketing, EmailLabs, remarked that behavioral targeting, which has emerged as a powerful tool for identifying individual consumer interests for advertisers and a lucrative source of revenue for online publishers, also allows email marketers to segment their user lists based on demographic/geographic or interests demonstrated by their responses.

As exciting as the new technologies are, Responsys' Shaw noted that this can be complicated, time consuming and expensive. She urged marketers to move gradually into behavioral segmentation by using existing response data or user registration information to target messages. But analytics are key. "The data will show you where you have the most benefit and lift," she said.