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Company
News
Does CAN-SPAM
Hurt Compliant Marketers?
ClickZ, E-Mail Marketing
BY Paul Soltoff | March 7, 2005
Want to hear something outrageous?
Since CAN-SPAM took effect just over a year ago, we've seen our
clients' delivery and open rates drop. When e-mail does get
through, it works just as well as it did before CAN-SPAM, in
some cases even better. Unfortunately, less e-mail is getting
past gatekeepers. We think we know why.
According to an MX Logic study:
97 percent of unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) still flouts
the law.
75 percent of all e-mail sent in 2004 was spam.
The law intended to deter spammers actually did the opposite.
ISPs have been forced to implement tighter spam-filtering rules
to better serve their customers, shutting out law-abiding e-mail
marketers.
We legitimate e-mail marketers follow the letter of the law,
making sure we use the best practices it's based on. We do this
to comply with the act and because it's ethically right.
Government enforcement hasn't played a very big role in the
situation thus far. ClickZ's Pamela Parker wrote that one FTC
official said the FTC is "likely" to start prosecuting
legitimate companies who aren't in compliance with the CAN-SPAM
Act. Although the FTC so far has focused on fraud in its
anti-spam enforcement efforts, with occasional dabbling in
pornography, that may be about to change.
So far, so good. Yet there are two disturbing trends:
CAN-SPAM doesn't deter the bad guys who refuse to play by the
rules.
Increasingly more legitimate, compliant e-mail is blocked and
filtered.
Talking With Jane Kaiser
I recently spoke with Jane
Kaiser, president of Eclipse Direct Marketing. She's in the
acquisition e-mail marketing trenches every day and has much the
same take on the situation.
Soltoff: Is CAN-SPAM hurting the e-mail marketers you work with?
Kaiser: While the law in and of itself was, and still is, very
much needed, CAN-SPAM is contributing to the decline in e-mail
marketing revenue on two important levels. First, the government
is selectively enforcing the law by only going after
high-profile cases so that the public is reassured that measures
are being taken to reduce the problem. At the same time, the FTC
and Department of Justice are slowly moving forward, spam abuse
continues to grow.
Soltoff: It appears after all this time, they haven't gone after
all the no-name guys who clog our mailboxes.
Kaiser: Pretty much. We also see that a number of companies are
receiving bad legal advice regarding the correct interpretation
of the law. The net result is that individual marketers are
building overly complex messages to be CAN-SPAM compliant. The
reality for today's marketer is that the more complexity
associated with a message, the greater the likelihood that an
ISP will filter out that message.
Soltoff: I agree. We're troubled at times on how to work with
ISPs to improve deliverability for our clients because the rules
change every day. Have you seen anything from the ISPs to help
the cause?
Kaiser: There exists a subtle adversarial relationship between
ISPs and all e-mail marketers -- both responsible marketers and
spammers. The ISPs have built their filters in such a way that
most common, best-practice marketing phrases are being
identified and subsequently suppressed. Increasingly, marketers
are finding that in order to get a message past an ISP Bayesian
filter, the marketer has to dumb-down the message to such an
extent that the recipient has a hard time associating the
message with any particular brand.
Soltoff: They're rendering e-mail practically useless, wouldn't
you agree?
Kaiser: Yes. From an economic standpoint, it's understandable
why the ISPs would not see any difference between responsible
e-mail and spam. All commercial e-mail, both responsible e-mail
and spam, is an expense for ISPs to deliver, both in processor
time and in customer service support, to respond to the
"vocal minority" that issue complaints. At the same
time, the ISPs are not compensated for their efforts.
Making CAN-SPAM More Effective
This isn't necessarily CAN-SPAM's fault, but how ISPs respond to
the law. Other internal reasons encourage filtering e-mail that
should be delivered.
Here's what must be done:
Establish one set of standards for all ISPs to follow for
filtering and blocking e-mail.
Establish a standard registry of legitimate e-mail marketers
allowed by all ISPs, just as there are domain registration
standards and postal change of address rules.
Until both happen, CAN-SPAM will continue to hurt the good guys
and spur on the bad guys.
Since CAN-SPAM took effect just over a year ago, we've seen our
clients' delivery and open rates drop. When e-mail does get
through, it works just as well as it did before CAN-SPAM, in
some cases even better. Unfortunately, less e-mail is getting
past gatekeepers.
In part one, we examined how CAN-SPAM has harmed legitimate
direct marketers. Now, we'll look at the nitty-gritty of what
happens when e-mail hits ISPs and what can be done to help
messages from legitimate e-mail marketers get through.
We spend way too much time worrying about getting e-mail
messages into customers' inboxes instead of being deleted or
redirected to bulk or spam folders by their ISPs. Regardless of
your position on CAN-SPAM, when an average 30 percent of
legitimate permission-based e-mail is deleted or redirected to
spam folders, we have a problem:
To get a handle on the situation, I spoke with Deirdre Baird,
president of Pivotal Veracity, a company that tracks what
happens to e-mail when it hits the ISPs. Our conversation
provided insight into the often-confusing world of e-mail
deliverability.
"Most marketers understand the impact their content and
subject line can have on delivery," said Baird.
"However, content-related problems, while still important,
are by no means the only problems that are impacting delivery
today. Most marketers tend to 'blame' the content when delivery
suffers, when, in fact, issues completely unrelated to content
are often the problem."
Taking Baird's assessment into account, some recommendations for
your e-mail marketing efforts.
Consistent, Timely Bounce Management
Many large ISPs block or redirect e-mail to the spam folder if
the mailer sends an excessive number of messages to invalid
e-mail addresses. The problem is double-edged. ISPs send bounce
notices to mailers for a variety of reasons. These reasons are
generally grouped into transitional problems ("soft
bounces") and permanent problems ("hard
bounces").
A soft bounce typically makes it through the mail server's front
gate but bounces back due to some issue with the recipient's
e-mail inbox. A soft bounce could occur because of a full
mailbox, an overextended or down server, too large a message,
user who is inactive for an extended time, and other reasons.
There are over 30 different types of hard bounces, the most
common being an invalid or nonexistent e-mail address. Others
can relate to too many recipients, an invalid media type, and
large message sizes that exceed what the receiver can accept.
Hard bounces never get past the mail server's front gate.
Every organization needs rules to handle e-mail bounces. We
remove e-mail from our files after two hard bounces or five soft
bounces. We've found this threshold best to validate the nature
of the bounces.
Proper HTML Construction
HTML e-mail is commonplace. Yet the vast majority of HTML
messages aren't compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
standards for HTML construction.
Bad HTML construction is the largest mailer-controlled reason
for improper message rendering. This can mean images don't show
up correctly, links don't work, tables are poorly nested, and
other issues. Some ISPs block or redirect improperly constructed
e-mail.
HTML designers and marketers should develop a checklist for
viewing their messages in different e-mail clients. Not everyone
uses Microsoft Outlook. Quite a few people use e-mail clients
from AOL and Eudora. And don't forget free Web-based e-mail,
such as Yahoo! and Hotmail. Each has its own HTML construction
issues.
IP-Related Issues and History
An inordinate number of delivery problems are related to a
mailer's IP infrastructure. These issues have a direct effect on
delivery and result in blocked mail or redirects to spam
folders.
The issues depend on whether you use an in-house solution or an
external ASP (define) to send e-mail. Issues for in-house
mailers typically relate to insecure or improperly configured
infrastructures that are fairly easy to fix. Examples include
not having reverse DNS (define) enabled, running insecure
versions of form mail, and having an improper SPF (define)
setup. Have your IT group validate that your infrastructure is
compliant with ISP spam filter rules.
For mailers who utilize external vendors, the most common
IP-related issue is use of shared IPs. Many e-mail delivery
vendors continue to deploy mail for many clients from the same
IP address. One mailer's activity can affect every other mailer
on the same IP address. If one mailer is blocked, every mailer
is blocked. Review the provider and ensure its IP address isn't
on block lists. Spam Assassin's list is a good place to start.
If you have a really good relationship with any of the major
ISPs, help everyone's cause by lobbying them to adopt standards
that once and for all help defeat the bad guys and make
legitimate e-mail more deliverable.
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