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Compliance with the CANSPAM Act remains below 5% after more than 9 months, according to eMarketer. This is disappointing news for those who hoped it would make a significant dent in the deluge of spam, but not surprising given the ambiguity of much of the legislation.
The fact that CANSPAM’s definition of commercial email is at once impossibly broad and needlessly vague has left many marketers wondering what is really covered. Are individual emails sent by a sales person to a prospective customer “commercial” or “relationship” mailings? Although the question has been posed directly, an equally clear answer has not been forthcoming. In fact, it seems that any time a direct answer is required the “judges” resort to quoting the text of the legislation itself and claiming it to be “self-explanatory”. A trend that leaves at least this writer questioning whether even the “judges” are sure what they meant.
Without a clearly written guideline that defines email in terms that are relevant to the industry and clearly delineates what emails must comply, there is no way for marketers to be sure they are fully compliant. Faced with impossible choices, many are throwing up their hands in frustration and sticking to best practices while hoping for a better solution.
Businesses taking matters into their own hands.
Consumers and businesses, on the other hand, continue to be deluged with unwanted messages. And continue to use a variety of methods to block them. According to data released by Forrester in July of this year, 61% of North American companies are using commercial filtering applications to fight spam at the server level, while another 27% use client-side filtering and 10% use open source applications. Only 9% of all participants reported doing nothing.
A combination of blacklists and rules-based blocking continue to be the most accepted methods of managing spam, although challenge/response and bonded sender programs were not directly identified. 37% of North American companies admitted to creating private blacklists of email URLs, with only 1/3 using publicly managed blacklists. Blacklists are directories of IP addresses known to have been used by spammers. Servers using blacklists simply refuse to accept ANY email from those IP addresses listed. In some cases the emailer will receive a notification that this is the case, but in many instances they will not.
Rules-based filtering – scanning messages and scoring them based on a combination of factors that include message weight, attachments, message type, header information, and the presence of particular strings of HTML code, keywords and phrases - is the method used by half of the companies surveyed.
There is also evidence to suggest that many companies are using several options simultaneously to effectively eliminate spam emails.
What does this mean for email marketers?
As consumers and companies become increasingly aggressive in their efforts to limit the annoyance of spam in their inboxes, email marketers must be particularly sensitive to their needs.
Make sure that your email marketing service is part of a respected bonded-sender program, is actively involved in self-regulation and maintains solid relationships with a variety of ISP’s. You’re at an advantage here if you or your emarketing agency are affiliated with a tier one ASP service, as these companies will have the strongest ISP relationships given that they are both self-policing and they act one behalf of a large volume of email marketers.
Take care to cleanse your email list regularly, making sure that unsubscribes and bounces are automatically removed and that customers have easy access to update their personal information. Then, let readers know how to unsubscribe every time you email them.
Send only the information customers have requested. Just because they asked for a price quote doesn’t mean that you can add them to your ezine subscriber list! And make sure that your subject line, from line and the copy within your email message clearly telegraph your intent and the contents of the message.
Finally, before you hit the ‘send’ button, take the time to run your message through a variety of spam filtering tests to ensure that you’ve eliminated any conditions that could result in a false positive blocking your email messages before they get to your subscribers’ desktops.
Best practices still win out.
For email marketers with a long-standing commitment to best practices and ethical email marketing, none of this should be new. It’s simply a renewed commitment to doing things the way we’ve always known they should be done.
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