TweakMarketing : Direct Marketing

Email importance in small and medium businesses
According to the survey carried our by Interland at the beginning of 2006:

85% of communicatin with customers is email correspondence
80% of communication with business partners is email correspondence
67% of communication with potential customers is email correspondence

Most online services wish to send news and information about discounts and special offers, but they are afraid to be listed as spammers. Whatever the case our emails are regularly mentioned in anti-spam black lists. Why does this happen? Because of being in a bad mood someone supposed your email had spam contents and thus reported about this to an anti-spam organization. They indiscriminately blocked your host or even worse, your subnetwork.

Real-world example: we are subscribed to the ISDEF, mailing list. Though the newsletters are closed there (and require payment!), the host www.isdef.org is frequently listed in the spamcop black list.

Law aspect.

How to organize email advertising campaigns in such a situation? Thousands of customers want to get news about updates, new services, special offers, etc. How to deliver emails to them and not to lose this information in spam filters or (worst of all) not to be listed in anti-spam black lists?

To answer these questions we will consider law aspects first. Above all, any actions should be legal (we should not break theCAN SPAM Act). In most countries there are anti-spam laws, and we have to keep within them when sending newsletters

Unfortunately organizations which make up black email lists do not want to observe these laws and in most cases their behaviour is the "e-terrorism" and "e-blackmail". Classifying you as a spammer by an anonymous statement they accuse you of illegal actions without invistigation or offer of proof. Such an approach is an unlawful act, specified in the code of laws as "slander". The precedent with the SpamHouse arraignment showed that such actions can be contested and punished. Personally I hope that in future these anti-spam organizations will change their role and become the "e-police", but this will happen much later.

Moreover I suppose anti-spammers are to blame for the uncontrolled heaps of spam. They create technical obstacles for spam emails and spammers are glad to compete in finding roundabout routes, most often successfully. In result only legal services and companies who are using email communication as a powerful marketing and support channel, suffer.

I am also surprised that though in 2005 FTC introduced the program Bounty Hunters, where one could get up to $2.000.000 (20% of the fine, but not more than $2.000.000) and the anti-spam organizations had all possible technical means, none of them made an attempt to participate in this program. I set aside the legality of their actions but hope that unconditional blocking email practice will become obsolete in the Internet, as it should be in any legal community.

That's why we forbid our system administrator to build the spam filters only upon anti-spam black lists, because we do not use happy-go-lucky approaches of anti-spam organizations.

Newsletters must correspond to the spam laws.

Most countries support (or have their own) CAN-SPAM Act, which has clear definitions for non-spam marketing newsletters.

It bans false or misleading header information.
Your email's "From," "To," and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.
It prohibits deceptive subject lines.
The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message.
It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method.
You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a "menu" of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.
Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email.
When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it's illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.
It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address.
Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

Following these requirements you should also remember spam law interdictions::

"harvest" email addresses from Web sites or Web services that have published a notice prohibiting the transfer of email addresses for the purpose of sending email
generate email addresses using a "dictionary attack" – combining names, letters, or numbers into multiple permutations
use scripts or other automated ways to register for multiple email or user accounts to send commercial email
relay emails through a computer or network without permission – for example, by taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without authorization.

It's really easy, isn't it? The only thing you need is to make your newsletters correspond these requirements.

In my opinion ordering newsletters at third-party companies is risky because you cannot be sure they will follow all of the definitions and avoid the interdictions.

Technical aspects.

Even if you keep within the law, you should not forget about technical requirements which can increase your newsletter efficiency.

Watch closely to keep your newsletter list relevant.
If you reiterate sending emails to invalid addresses your SMTP server can be rated as potentially dangerous.
Some webservers (such as AOL.COM) limit a number of emails sent from one IP address during one session. If this number exceeds the limit, your SMTP server will be blocked as potentially dangerous for a definite period. Recurrent sending attempts will lead to permanent SMTP server blocking.
The newsletter return address must be valid and able to receive email responses. (to control Bounce-Back responses).
The newsletter return address must be reasonable, without numbers and include not more than 8 symbols.
The newsletter SMTP server should not have Open Relay and must validate the email return address (in the From field).
Do not use uppercase in the email subject..
Keeping in mind that 99% of advertising cliches are listed in all spam filters, please spend some time and devise a very creative newsletter subject.
Replacing letters with numbers or special symbols in the subject you may be banned.

TweakMarketing Newsletters Manager entirely corresponds to the CAN-SPAM Act and has a number of tools to keep all of these regulations.

Direct Marketing

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