Marketing e-mail has become a disgrace. My in-box is flooded with e-mail that assumes I am broke, overweight, a degenerate, and not the man I used to be. The online public and its legislators are outraged by all this spam. Corporate America is spending millions on spam filters; states are passing aggressive and restrictive spam laws. We all agree it is a problem. Yet as business people and technologists, we also know e-mail is a cost-effective way to reach customers and potential customers. Your organization may not be directly involved in sending bulk e-mails, but Ill wager someone up or down your food chain is.

As of press time, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission had the authority to enforce the national Do Not Call Registry. Even if the courts overturn this legislation, the average consumer is so sick of telemarketers that the telephone may no longer be a viable means of marketing. Direct mail marketing has become cost prohibitive and less effective. Whats left? E-mail. Like it or not, e-mail marketing is a valuable business toolboth in the B2B and B2C marketplace. That e-mail may be coming from the home office, or an agency, or an agent. The source doesnt really matter. What does matter is an e-mail carrying your companys branding is touching customers or prospects, and you need to make certain your e-mail is not identified as spam. E-mail doesnt even need to carry a marketing message to be considered spam. The phrase unsolicited bulk e-mail often may connote a marketing or sales pitch, but it just as easily could be a piece of corporate communication or a newsletter.

Spam: Its Better Fried
What is spam? Its the general term used for unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE) or unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). You see the commonality here? Un-solicitedif you didnt ask for it, you are being spammed! Although some recipients will call any marketing e-mail spam, generally accepted usage does not identify marketing e-mail as spam if the recipient has an established business or other relation with the marketer. If you have registered on a Web site for some service, there is a good chance you (perhaps inadvertently) identified yourself as someone willing to receive e-mail. There are a thousand different ways to get on an e-mail list. And once you are on a legitimate list (at least one you perceive as legitimate), there is a very good chance you will land on a thousand lists.

Businesses regularly sell or rent their customer lists. Once your e-mail address has been sold or rented, you might as well assume every nefarious spam house in the universe has it. Professional list sellers and resellers have a much different idea of opt-in and opt-out than you or I do. If you havent threatened to kidnap their first-born unless you are removed from their lists, resellers assume you are an opt-in. I have seen rented lists spammed by a reseller with opt-out instructions that were impossible to read or interpret. The list then is offered to other marketers as a guaranteed opt-in list.

Opt-In Only
If your organization or someone representing your organization is going to send bulk e-mails, it is absolutely essential you send that e-mail only to true opt-ins. My definition of true opt-ins are individuals who have provided you with their e-mail and given you permission to provide them with information or marketing materials. Once individuals receive that e-mail, they should be sent a confirmation e-mail with explicit instructions stating something like: You have registered on the XYZ Web site and requested to receive information on variable life insurance plans. If this is correct, please click here to verify this information and your e-mail address. If users dont click through, they should not be considered as an opt-in target. There you goa simple, virtually foolproof procedure. Your buddy cant sign you up for advertising from the Sock of the Month Club without having your verification of the first e-mail.

There are numerous reasons you should market only to opt-ins. The most obvious reason is it is the law in some states. California just passed (September 24, 2003) a very scary statute that provides for fines of up to $1 million for violations. This law will be contested as will other antispam laws. Some of these laws will be overturned. But that shouldnt affect us as responsible businesses using technology to market to our customers. We should welcome the strict antispam laws in the hope they eventually will drive out the irresponsible purveyors of undesirable spam. Our self-imposed rules should be stricter than any state law. I dont need the Larry Flynts of this world ensuring the continuation of my First Amendment rights. And I dont need offshore spammers hiring attorneys to defend my rights to market effectively to my customers.

They Are Our Customers
The real issue isnt the law. The real issue is maintaining a good image with your customers and prospective customers. Nobody likes spam. Make sure the people you e-mail dont perceive your offerings as spam. Even after the first double opt-in, every opt-in you provide your customers should have an obvious and easy way to opt out or unsubscribe. It is a good idea to have multiple opt-out methods. Some users hit the reply button and type in unsubscribe. Others just will hit reply and send the mail right back at you. Your system needs to act on those replies. The action may be nothing more than forwarding that reply to a customer service representative for response, but something has to be done. The customer has sent you a signact on it. As technical folk, we tend to take e-mail as second nature, as a logical extension of other means of communication. Dont make the assumption that just because it makes sense to you, it will make sense to most of your users. Send your mother a sample and see if she can opt out without calling for help. If it passes the mom test, it probably is a pretty good system.

Without proper metrics, we are unable to judge the effectiveness of any advertising campaign. There are a few unique tracking methods available to e-mail marketers:
You can track bounces, which are e-mails that are not delivered for a variety of reasons (bad e-mail address, refusal of the e-mail, etc.). Bounced e-mails provide a great opportunity to contact customers via another method to verify their e-mail address.
Much e-mail is designed to track reads. This is not an accurate metric, although it is useful. Reads generally are tracked by placing a field in an HTML e-mail that fetches a hidden token from a server. When this token is retrieved, that event is logged and marked as a read. This does not mean an e-mail actually was opened and read by the recipient. Most e-mail clients have a preview pane that displays the contents of an e-mail before it is opened. If the preview fetches the token, it will be logged as a read. Some firewall utilities also will render false positives. Third-party vendors that deliver bulk e-mails use these methods and occasionally mislead users into thinking some specific number of e-mails from a particular campaign actually were read. You need to be very careful in interpreting read numbers. They are probably most useful when interpreted as a relative trend from one campaign to the next. On the other hand, if your reads go from 50 percent to 5 percent, you safely can assume everyone is flagging your e-mail as unwanted and deleting it before it has a chance to be read.
Click-throughs are the best way to track effectiveness. Typically you might offer a special incentive for a user to click through to a special item. Those click-throughs are tracked easily and can provide an excellent metric. An e-mail campaign describing a whole life policy may click through to a Web site where sample rates are displayed. The identity of the user who clicked through is recorded.

I Played by the Rules, but . . .
You may be sending a valuable e-newsletter to a carefully selected group of double opt-in customers. Some of these customers may be using AOL. Those customers decide they no longer want to receive your newsletter and start clicking the report spam button on AOL. Before you know it, you could be identified as a spammer at AOL. I imagine it takes more than a couple of report spam clicks at AOL to trigger this, but it can happen. Now you cant send any e-mail to any of your AOL customers, and you are in trouble. A similar scenario could take place with any Internet service provider. I use AOL as an example because it is everywhere and easy to pick on.
You even may be reported as a spammer on one of the antispam sites such as www.spamcop.net. That organization provides various lists and services used by corporations to filter out spam. There are procedures by which you are able to contest your identification as a spammer and, if successful, get removed from the spammer lists. So what? You really dont want to be in a position of proving you are not a spammer. You need to monitor your e-mail activities carefully so that you never get to that point.

Chances are if you become identified as a spammer, you are marked by the mail server IP address. All e-mail from that IP will be blocked. You better hope your corporate mail isnt using that same IP address. If you get busted again, your entire range of IP addresses may get marked. It also is possible your domain name (biginsurancecompany.com) may be flagged as a spammer. These all are obviously things you dont want to happen. You can prevent them by, first, carefully controlling all outgoing bulk e-mail and, second, establishing and enforcing strict corporate policy on mailing lists.

Truth Is Out There, or Is It?
Like most things in the world today, perception is reality. You dont have to be bulk e-mailing distasteful marketing junk from a third-party e-mailing house to be perceived as a spammer. Zealous individuals in your organization may be sending useful corporate communications through your regular mail server by pasting a list of recipients into the BCC: box in their mail client. Those bulk communications could be interpreted as spam by some individuals as well as commercial spam filters (multiple BCC addresses is a typical red flag for spam). That probably wont get you busted by an ISP, but it easily could lead to being marked as a spammer by an individual firm or organization.

The use of suspect keywords in a subject line may cause your e-mail to be flagged as spam and thus nondelivery. See how many of your e-mails make it through spam filters if you use the word free in the subject line. Even your server configuration may flag you as a spammer. Some ISP and corporate filters require that reverse DNS be enabled for your mail servers so that your valid domain name can be matched up with the IP address. AT&T WorldNet had to back down from that procedure after users started complaining about their inability to receive legitimate e-mail. The point is there is no foolproof method to ensure the e-mail you send wont be flagged as spam by some ISP or some user or some filters.

First, Do No Harm
Be aware of state and federal legislation regarding e-mail (try www.spamlaws.com). As I said before, we are not an industry that should be dancing around the limits of the law, but the laws do provide us with solid guidelines for acceptable usage. Adopt enforceable corporate policy for control of e-mail lists and bulk e-mail. If you must e-mail lists that are not opt-ins, follow the guidelines and include ADV in the subject line. Dont sell or rent your e-mail lists unless you have obtained permission to do so (unlikely). Clearly state your corporate spam and privacy policies on your Web sites. Obtaining and retaining customers is a difficult task these days. Dont risk losing them by being perceived as a spammer.