Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

08 FEATURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
We don’t require the mailer to remove that person from the list,
and we don’t say that you are guilty of spamming because a
consumer clicked “report spam.” But instead, we tell the marketer
that consumers are telling us they don’t want your message,
they consider it to be spam, so please act accordingly. And
I can tell you that in almost every single circumstance, a legitimate
mailer will say, “Absolutely, if they don’t want my mailing,
I’ll take them off the list.” Because it doesn’t do them any good
if somebody is not even going to pay attention and, in fact, has
a bad taste in his mouth as a result.
DM News: So how does the spam issue in general affect legitimate
marketers? Does it affect them?
CS: I believe it does. I think that the more we have spam out
there, the more it makes e-mail an illegitimate means of communicating,
or it certainly affects the ability of a legitimate marketer
to deliver its message in the intended way. Because at the
end of the day, the goal is to have marketers send messages that
consumers want. At the end of the day, it really becomes a lot
less about permission, and more about what consumers are asking
for. And if all marketers did that, then we wouldn’t be in
this situation.
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DM News: So what are your expectations for the spam situation?
Will marketers that don’t authenticate still get delivered?
CS: I think that authentication is going to have a really big role in
delivery in the very near future. I don’t see us as immediately having
a hard fail or a hard pass for authentication, because it’s merely
a means of saying, “This is my ID, this is who I am.” It doesn’t
say anything about your reputation, and that is a completely different
ball of wax. But it will allow us to attribute that reputation
according to the mailer’s actual mailing history and how it sends
mail and what consumers think of it.
I think that as authentication is more widely adopted and
becomes more integrated with reputation systems, legitimate marketers
are going to find that they are able to take advantage of that
good reputation that they’ve worked so hard on, and that they are
going to continue to see very good delivery rates — perhaps even
better delivery rates — than they have in the past.
But at the same time, I think that spammers that take advantage
of consumers and take advantage of all the little loopholes and
tricks and tactics and criminal activity that they use to get the messages
delivered, they are going to find themselves hard pressed to
get anything through, because they are going to be held accountable
for their reputation. ■