Lost in a sea of spam?

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Feb 2003 by Keating, Tom

Being able to directly market to your customers, whether it's via fax, phone calls or e-mail goes right to the heart of our American capitalist society. Unfortunately, the right to market to your customers has been slowly eroding due to a few bad apples.

When marketing via the telephone first began (telemarketing), there was some abuse, which led to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) working with Congress to form rules and guidelines by which telemarketing companies must abide. In addition, state laws were passed to help protect customers from being harassed by unscrupulous telemarketers. Do-not-call lists and do-not-fax lists were established and the telemarketing/teleservices industry became legitimized and flourished without the stigma of being a "shady" business practice. The growth of the telemarketing or teleservices industry to a multibillion dollar industry is proof that outbound telemarketing does indeed work.

Unfortunately, with the advent of the Internet and the explosion of e-mail addresses, "shady" characters looking to make an easy buck have sprung up to sell everything from ink jet cartridges, to human growth hormone, to weight loss gimmicks, free vacations, free porn, debt consolidation, low mortgage rates and, of course, Viagra. You know them as spammers.

I know them as the most vile, evil creatures that ever walked the face of the earth.

In all seriousness, spammers and their practices pose a serious threat to the legitimate e-mail marketers. I consider a legitimate e-mail marketer to be a company that sends e-mail messages to their customers only, or rents e-mail lists from people that "opted in" to receiving third-party e-mail offers. They must also maintain a do-not-email list, or an "opt-out" list, for me to consider them legitimate, Truly strict e-mail marketers use what is called a "double-optin" process, whereby they notify you via email that you have been removed or added to their e-mail marketing list.

My History With E-mil

When I first started using e-mail nine years ago, I had all my e-mail notifications turned on. Outlook would show me a popup window that would say, "You have received a new e-mail. Do you wish to read it now?" Since I only received an e-mail every 15 minutes, it was no big deal to have this pop-up window, even though it sometimes interrupted my typing in Microsoft Word. Eventually, as I started receiving more e-mail, including spam, I turned off the pop-up window, but left on the sound chime notification and mail envelope icon notification in the system tray. Soon, I was receiving an e-mail every two minutes, and it became too distracting to have Outlook give me any sort of notification that a new email had arrived. I felt liked one of Pavlov's dogs, trained by the sound of the Outlook chime sound to automatically stop whatever it was I was doing and immediately determine what the e-mail was about. After all, it could be from a friend or family member, an important business issue, or a critical IT issue that needed to be addressed immediately. More often than not, the e-mail could have waited. Unfortunately, the damage was done - I got sidetracked and it took me a few moments to get back into the mind-set of what I had been previously working on.

Due to the distraction of constant e-mail notifications, I eventually turned off all notifications, including the mail envelope icon in the lower-right-hand corner system tray, the flashing of the mouse cursor, and even the e-mail chime sound. It just became too distracting to receive a new e-mail every 120 seconds only to find out the message was an unimportant piece of spam. In addition, I used Outlooks rules to prioritize, sort and move e-mail based on person or keywords. For example, common spam keywords, such as "mortgage rates;' were easily filtered into my Spam folder. But my manual filtering was no more than 80 percent accurate at catching spam and it seemed a never-ending battle between the spammers and me to constantly update my keyword filtering algorithms.

Spammers often try to equate their practices with the junk mail you receive in your home mailbox. They say, "Well, people have to deal with throwing away unsolicited junk mail at home and THAT'S perfectly legal, so why can't we send unsolicited e-mail?" This argument, in my opinion, doesn't hold any water. First, junk mail incurs some sort of cost on the junk mail senders. Thus, they can't send a piece of junk mail to every U.S. mailing address they'd go bankrupt due to the printing and mailing costs. So they use targeted lists, usually geographic in nature or by some sort of demographic, such as good credit history, or current subscribership to a specific magazine. Because the list is targeted, unlike spammers, junk mail senders don't blanket every mailing address in creation to try and get people to "bite" on their marketing campaign. I can quickly sort through my junk mail in a minute or less, and it's on my own personal time, not on the corporate dime.

Conversely, e-mail spammers do not incur any cost when they mass e-mail a large database of e-mail addresses. Except for the cost of the Internet connection, sending e-mail has virtually no cost, so they "blanket" mass e-mail every address they can find. On the other hand, the cost to ISPs is massive, requiring them to add extra network bandwidth and network hardware to handle the load of spam. In fact, several studies estimate that between 20 percent and 40 percent of all ISP network traffic is spam-related.