Is E-mail Still Effective?
By Richard Hoy
With recent press surrounding the CAN-SPAM Act, possible future
charges for sending e-mail and virus creators competing with each
other for infection rates, how can you ensure that your e-mail communications
are still effective and reach their intended recipients?
E-mail has qualities that make it an ideal communication vehicle:
1) People interpret e-mail much more like a conversation than
like reading printed text.
2) People generally read e-mail messages within 48 hours of receiving
them.
3) Because people tend to read messages when they are received,
the conversation hinges on the timetable of the sender.
4) Producing, delivering and archiving e-mail is quick and inexpensive.
5) Everyone with an e-mail address knows how to send and read
e-mail.
But for all of these positive characteristics, e-mail has taken
a serious blow over the past six years.
BrightMail, an anti-spam technology company, estimated
that 62 percent of all e-mail sent across the Internet was identified
as some sort of spam by users of their technology.
This single act of marketers escalating their use of e-mail as
a cheap way to try to lure buyers has strangled the best communication
technology to come along since pencil and paper.
It has also led to very ugly, unethical and illegal practices such
as domain hijacking (forging the return address to mask the source),
viruses, advertisements for schemes, male enhancement drugs and
even outright fraud.
As a direct result of spam, the majority of e-mail today goes through
some sort of filter software. And because of the volume of messages,
the filtering process has to be automatic; thus, it's not foolproof.
Lots of legitimate e-mail gets misidentified and deleted.
Furthermore, the federal government is now involved. On 1 January
2004, the U.S. Congress passed the CAN-SPAM act. It is now a violation
of Federal law if certain e-mail communications (specifically newsletters
and any direct e-mail) don't contain certain information.
There is even talk
of charging postage for e-mail in the hope of taking away the economic
incentive to spam.
All this has not only destroyed the trust people once had in e-mail
as a medium, but also made it much more risky for senders of legitimate
e-mail to do business without the potential of a lawsuit.
Is there any hope for e-mail? Honestly, I'm not sure. The spam
problem is so extreme and the efforts to combat it so Draconian
that it's difficult for legitimate e-mail communication to thrive.
That said, it is still here today. And there are things you can
do to maximize your chances of continuing to use it as an effective
communications vehicle.
Get a Voice
Interesting e-mail is read e-mail. When it doesn't arrive, it is
missed e-mail. And when people are missing e-mail, they complain
to their Internet service providers. Complaints put pressure on
ISPs to make sure legitimate e-mail gets through their spam defenses.
A useful book on the market that specifically addresses how to
write interesting copy for the Internet is Nick Usborne's "Net
Words."
Stick with Text
Because e-mail software like Microsoft Outlook can display HTML,
the hot trend a few years ago was to publish HTML versions of e-mail
newsletters. The problem with this method is the one can write code
within HTML that makes malicious things happen. Now, many ISPs simply
disable HTML e-mail while they are doing the spam filtering. The
end result is not a pretty, well-formatted document, but one that
looks like alphabet soup.
The safest bet is to stick with plain ASCII text that has line
breaks every 60 characters or so. Do this, and you'll be certain
your e-mail looks the same on every computer opening it.
Require Opt-In
Make sure you send e-mail only to people who have confirmed they
want to receive it. This is known as opt-in. Without an opt-in step,
you can't be certain that people who sign up are really who they
claim to be. Believe it or not, people with too much time on their
hands actually write programs that do nothing more that add random
e-mail addresses to lists. There's also the risk that one of your
competitors may be adding unauthorized e-mail addresses to your
list in the hopes of having you labeled as a spammer, thus destroying
your reputation.
Conversely, make sure people who unsubscribe actually are removed
from your list.
Obey the Law
As previously mentioned, there is now a federal law requiring all
newsletter and direct advertisement mailings have: 1) a correct
return e-mail address, 2) the physical address of the sender and
3) a working and obvious unsubscribe function. A good article on
this subject is Jeanne Jennings’ “Complying
With CAN-SPAM: A 10-Point Checklist for Marketers.”
If you really want to cover all your bases, review the “Basic
Mailing List Management Guidelines for Preventing Abuse.”
Deliver that E-mail
This may sound simple and obvious, but you can't just put thousands
of e-mail addresses in the "To:" field of your e-mail
message and hit send. First, your ISP will likely block the message
so it never leaves your computer. Second, it is considered terribly
rude and bad form to just cram everyone's address into the "To:"
field.
If you're sending out more that a few dozen messages at once, you
need to have some sort of delivery software or service—software
or a company responsible for delivering the actual messages to your
list of recipients.
The honest truth is that, if your list is about 5,000 subscribers
or less, you can do it yourself. If you have from 5,000 to 70,000
subscribers, you can still do it yourself, but you need professional
help setting up the software. If you are dealing with a list that
has more than 70,000 subscribers, you are best off hiring a list-hosting
company that specializes in managing e-mail lists.
For lists of 5,000 or less, one option is Dada
Mail. It's an excellent piece of software that runs on the same
machine as your web site.
For lists of 5,000 to 70,000, an option is a program called MailMan,
but you'll need to have someone very familiar with UNIX to set it
up for you.
If you don't have access to the machine on which your web site
runs, or otherwise can't install the above software, there is a
software package that will run under Windows called PostCast.
If you are dealing with a mailing to more that 70,000 addresses,
the best bet is to seek out a professional list-hosting service.
Before you sign with anyone, do a little research by reading MarketingSherpa's
"Buyers'
Guide to Email Broadcast Services for Marketers & Publishers:
How to Pick a List Host." MarketingSherpa has a whole
series of useful reports on e-mail.
After years of making other people money in exchange for vague promises
of Internet-based wealth, Richard Hoy struck out on his own in the
Spring of 2000. Together with his wife, they formed Booklocker.com,
Inc.—a company that provides a low-cost publishing and
sales environment for independent authors. In addition, the company
owns WritersWeekly.com,
an e-mail newsletter and web site that reaches more than 40,000
unique visitors each month.
Richard has been in the Internet marketing field since 1995,
nearly all of his professional life. Among other things, Richard
created and edited "The ClickZ
Guide to E-mail Marketing," one of the first compendiums on
the subject of the field of e-mail marketing. He can be reached
at richard@booklocker.com.
Discuss this topic with other IABC members at: www.iabc.com/memberspeak.
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