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November 22, 2004

Reveries reports that even though 45% of marketing professionals in the US qualify 'spam flooding' in their inboxes as a "big" or "huge" problem, 42% still do not perceive e-mail to be "broken."

Are marketing professionals confused?

Reveries quotes permission e-mail marketing provider TrueFire's founder Brad Wenkos who says, "A logical explanation is that most of the survey respondents, while seasoned marketing professionals, perhaps have not had much experience running permission-based, e-mail marketing campaigns...it's only those in the front lines who grasp the many challenges and roadblocks that legitimate campaigns must navigate through to reach their audiences."

Sponsored by TrueFire, Reveries surveyed 525 marketing professionals this month — 20% of whom worked at marketing services companies, another 20% of whome worked at consulting firms and 18% of whom were from agencies.

The study determined that to reduce spam clutter in their mailboxes, 35% of respondents use spam filters while 27% have unsubscribed from unsoliciated e-mail messages.

More respondents find spam filters to be succesful than those who have had success by unsubscribing from spam e-mail.

Compared to marketing professionals, most consumers (72%) simply delete spam without reading it, reports DoubleClicks, while 20% try to unsubscribe from spam messages they receive.

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But is spam the only issue facing permission e-mail marketing? According to Wenkos, there are 11 other roadblocks:

1) Blocking — ISPs blocking e-mail according to IP addresses (not an exact science)

2) Blacklisting — the practice of independent anti-spam organizations to blacklist according to IP address

3) Creative limitations — certain words simply cannot be used in e-mail creative due to spam filters

4) Image, link and HTML stripping — the practice of removing any of the three in hopes of stopping anything offensive from coming through to an e-mail system

5) E-Mail reader compatability — there are many e-mail readers out there, and they each read e-mail differently

6) Rich media integration — though rich media is gaining popularity in the online ad space (see eMarketer's Rich Media report), it is not compatible with e-mail

7) Abuse management — when recipients report a message as spam to their ISP or to an anti-spam organization, they are not usually questioned, and the company is blacklisted

8) Bounced mail — bounce logs are often inaccurate and senders usually have to send messages several times to bounced addresses

9) Best-guess reporting — the methods used to track bounced messages, delivered messages, opens and click-throughs are often flawed

10) Delivery delays — a problematic e-mail server or the congested Internet can delay the delivery of e-mail campaigns

11) Anti-spam compliance — as the government develops legislation for spam regulation, legitimate permisson marketers are bound to suffer as well.

Source: eMarketer