In the Driver's Seat

Circulation Management, May 1, 2004

Byline: Lorraine Calvacca

Not so long ago, some publishers thought that the "electronic superhighway" would help put them on easy street. The wildly optimistic believed that new business would flow like Sunday traffic - every light a green light - bringing in fistsful of dollars with relatively little effort.

"Five or six years ago publishers were focused on using their Web sites to sell advertising," says circulation consultant Priscilla Garston. "In most cases ad revenue fell short of expectations but subscription sales kept increasing, shifting publishers' high hopes for the Web to circulation. And while circulators have found that Web marketing has tremendous potential, they have also found that there are difficult and complex issues with this wonderful new source."

Marketers say they are grappling with a host of issues and challenges for which they are just beginning to create a roadmap. "It took decades for traditional direct marketing to develop guidelines, standards and practices," said Shannon Aronson, CMP Media's director of corporate audience development. "Now we're testing in a new medium, so we're tweaking the standards." Of course, Web and email marketing offer an evolving list of unique challenges and opportunities.

Spam Filters

Perhaps topping the list of concerns is email deliverability. Well before the Can Spam Act passed in January, legitimate marketers were wrestling with how to circumvent spam filters. And that concern has mushroomed with the escalating war against unsolicited commercial email, and the growth of anti-spam technology.

"We can see that it's getting more challenging to get emails through," said Jessica Roosa, Internet promotions manager at Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, a publisher of more than 200 medical titles. Roosa has found industry standards of a 20% bounced rate to be consistent with her email promotions. "There are so many ways for mail to get blocked," observes Roosa, citing ISP filters, corporate filters and more recently anti-spam programs and options at the user level.

"Spam filters have definitely become more problematic for marketers in the past couple of years," said Jennifer Wilson, vice president of marketing at Return Path, an email performance service company. According to the company's recently released study "Email Blocking and Filtering Report," for the second half of last year, nearly 19% of 30,000 email campaigns across the top 18 ISPs sent between July and December of 2003 did not get delivered - up 17% over the first half of last year. That stems in part from email being blocked at many levels.

"The filtering world changes daily as systems administrators attempt to stay ahead of spammers' tricks," said Wilson. And things have gotten even more problematic for marketers with the advent of complaint-based systems used by ISPs.

"Because ISPs let the consumer hit the 'This is Spam' button to report unwanted email, it's easy for the consumer to complain rather than unsubscribe from the email list," said Wilson. "Enough of these complaints, even if consumers have opted in for your emails, will land you on the blacklist." In point of fact, users may think that they are unsubscribing when they hit the "spam" button.

Some false-positive filtering

On the other side of the equation, filters may be trapping mail that recipients requested and actually do want. In a study by Bigfoot Interactive and NOP/World/Roper ASW conducted in November 2003, 24% of all consumers indicated that they did not receive an email they requested and expected from a trusted source. In addition, 28% of respondents reported that the email they had requested from a trusted source was delivered to a junk folder.

The blocking of permission-based emails, also called a false positive, "is a huge concern," said Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive, citing a recent Jupiter Research report that blocked permission emails cost marketers $230 million last year, a figure projected to increase to $419 million by 2008.

"The false positive issues have the potential to inflict real financial and relationship damage on organizations ill equipped to understand, monitor and track delivery of critical communications like billing alerts and more," said DiGuido.

Despite the hurdles of over-aggressive spam filtering, CMP's Aronson reports that "our delivery rates are good." But that doesn't happen, she said, without extreme vigilance and proactive monitoring.

Like other circulators, Aronson said it's critical to educate yourself by attending industry events on the topic, talking to colleagues, keeping up on new anti-spam technologies, pushing vendors to offer more solutions, and sending every email through spam-detecting software. In addition, her department has created a company-wide task force that meets quarterly to share information and ideas to improve deliverability.

However overwhelming the current situation, Return Path's Wilson and Bigfoot Interactive's DiGuido believe that after things get worse, they will get better. "Delivery rates will improve as companies get smarter about how they send email, filtering technologies advance and ISPs standardize methods for determining what mail gets delivered," DiGuido predicts.