The CANSPAM Act just passed here in the US, so I decided to call Loren McDonald, VP of Marketing for EmailLabs, on his views about how this would affect the marketing industry. Just for some background information: “EmailLabs is an email marketing solutions company that empowers corporations with leading edge emarketing solutions.” (from the site)
They recently released some interesting findings on what days of the week are the best to send email marketing messages.
As you’ll see, our conversation covered his belief that the act will increase spam.
Grab some coffee and listen in on an exclusive interview with one of email marketing’s biggest players!
Garrett: How do you think the CANSPAM Act will affect spam and email marketing in general?
Loren: At the end of the day, none of us really know. It could either increase it or decrease [spam]. We think in many cases it might actually increase it because basically from our perspective CANSPAM didn’t go far enough; it didn’t take the opt-in approach. It took the opt-out approach, so every business in the country could now say, ‘We have oopportunity to send emails to pretty much anyone we want, as long as we include an opt-out function in the email.” We think that’s just wrong. The world has changed. The train has left the station. Now you have to look at customer relationships and the concept of blasting emails just doesn’t work anymore.
To Spam or Not to Spam? Loren says one question we should be asking is: “Will CANSPAM actually scare off some of the borderline spammers? Will the threat of going to prison or big fines actually scare those people out of the system and into getting a real job or doing something different?”
“The interesting thing,” Loren pointed out, “is it could turn some of them into legal spammers. Again, we don’t know and won’t know until January 1st what will happen but the law basically says you can’t have deceptive subject lines, you must have a working unsubscribe link, and all those things are staples of spammers. They do all those things we know are bad. They harvest email addresses so they have a list of hundreds of millions of people. You and I are on that list.”
Yes, we are.
“But the law basically says now if your subject line is not deceiving and your reply address works … and they have something in the email that says ‘this is an advertisement or promotional mailing’ [the email is] legal.
Will People Opt-Out? “I think we’ve all been trained in the last year not to opt-out. If you’re deleting 75-100 emails it’s just as easy to delete one or two more, but you realize you probably should just unsubscribe.”
G: “I was taught not to unsubscribe from spam because that gives proof there’s someone reading the mailings at the other end.”
L: “There are still newsletters I get everyday that I’ve been receiving for four years or whatever but I haven’t unsubscribed for whatever reason. Instead I just delete them because they’re intermixed with literally hundreds of spam emails when I check email in the morning. So some of these former illegitimate spammers could turn legit partially because they know these people won’t unsubscribe.”
So Who Will It Stop? “I think that a combination of the rebounding economy and a prison threat might scare some borderline people out of the business. People who are out of work. Programmers wanting to make quick bucks by blasting emails. But the really big guys we read about in the Wall Street Journal and overseas criminals won’t be stopped. Is a strong law going to stop someone who’s a criminal in most of our minds? Probably not.”
Loopholes. Another thing to think about is there are probably enough loopholes that spammers could dodge the law very easily. Loren agrees that this is a very clear possibility.
L: “The key is they already have hundreds of mills of illegally harvested email addresses. They captured these 200 million addresses through illegal activities but by going forward, by having a working unsubscribe link, having working ‘reply to’ addresses and not deceiving people in their subject lines, they’re pretty much okay.”
“What Have They Really Lost?” While some people will choose to opt-out, Loren makes another good point. Even if this lowers the number of people on the mailing list from 200 million to, say, 150 million, “what have they really lost? It’s one of those things where none of us really know what’s going to happen.”
Is this the right approach? One scenario is that “tens of thousands of small businesses will start blasting emails where they didn’t before because it’s now legal to do that. Who knows? I think some businesses are going to do that, especially the smaller ones. A couple years ago it was very common practice for companies to get a directory, hand it to their secretary, and say, ‘Okay, go in and basically type in an Excel spreadsheet the CFOs … and start sending emails to those people.’ Over the last couple years we’ve learned you can’t do that anymroe. It’s not best way to build trust and relationships. But after January 1st there’s no law against that anymore. Is that the right approach, whether it’s legal or not?”
The Future of Email Marketing. I asked Loren whether he believes the future has in store for email marketing. He provided an overwhelmingly positive outlook.
L: “I actually see [email marketing] rising in importance. I don’t know if you saw the press release on the webinar poll we did. For our jupiter research webinar on email issues, we polled participants and one of the questions we asked was: what are your most significant delivery challenges? The number one challenge cited was dealing with spam filters.”
And the least of the worries? According to the poll, “spam laws” were at the very bottom of the list. The second question asked was: what kinds of actions are you taking to deal with that challenge? Loren says, “One of top responses was hiring internal resources. What that confirms for me is email markeitng is maturing as a marketing activity. Over last 20 years advertising media relations and things like that have been built around marketing activities but email marketing is fairly new [and] has gotten popular. We still to this day bring on lots of new clients who are clueless about sending HTML emails. There are still tens of thousands of companies who haven’t gotten into email marketing yet. At the same time there are all these factors we haven’t talked about yet. There are all these challenges. When we combine the industry with email becoming a legit direct marketing customer relation channel, if you will, the service provider industry built up.”
The Hottest Thing. He says people are “realizing this is a hot and effective channel for building customer relationships and generating revenue if you’re into eCommerce. There have been search engine optimization and search engine marketing bumps over the past year that have taken sales away from email marketing as the hot thing. Email will come back I think. The buzz will return. But it will solidify as a core email marketing activity. People will start hiring dedicated email marketing people. That’s the next phase. [Many companies] have a PR firm or in-house PR representative. In our client base, not a single client has a dedicated email marketing person. They have webmasters, etc., but aren’t spending enough time on email marketing. People will realize email marketing is valuable and complex. It’s not a path of fancy. It’s here to stay. But at the same time it’s difficult to do well. We need to dedicate more resources to it.”
G: Any closing thoughts?
L: “The last point is key,” Loren repeated, noting that email marketing is still evolving. “A lot of people got into it because it’s an inexpensive channel, it’s easy to do, highly measurable, that sort of thing, but over the last couple of years people have learned that to do it well requires testing and dedicating resources and having a provider able to make sure emails get delivered… People will realize this is a hugely valuable channel but they basically have to spend more time on it, get more resources, get ROI, and get the better deal.”
Is there anything you’d like to ask Loren? I’ll be calling him periodically to ask about email marketing issues, and would love to know if there’s anything you’d like me to follow up with.
What do you think the affect of the CANSPAM act will be? Let us know!
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
