Is the future of email marketing certified?
I'll nail my colors to the mast right here: I believe you will need to certify your marketing emails in the future.
Why?
First, it fits with the general trend toward accountability and transparency in email marketing.
More importantly, though, a credible means of tagging or identifying "good" bulk email benefits everyone in the email system...
Marketers can spend less time dealing with deliverability problems and more time creating emails of value to both subscribers and their business.
ISPs and other receivers save on the resources otherwise needed to evaluate these "good" bulk emails.
Subscribers actually get the commercial email they asked for delivered to their inboxes.
As Ken Takahashi (Return Path's Vice President, Global Channels) puts it, "...ISPs and other receivers need help differentiating good email from bad, and certification is a huge help with that. By requiring mailers to meet high standards, programs like Sender Score Certified improve the email ecosystem by decreasing receiver costs and making sure end recipients get the emails they want."
The benefits are even greater if you envisage future certification programs where accredited email is guaranteed delivery to the inbox, with images, links and interactive elements kept intact (an extended version of the Goodmail model).
Goodmail Systems' Senior Director of Industry Relations, Jordan Cohen, suggests that if receivers can be sure of the authenticity and safety of the incoming message, then "...ISPs are going to be able to make the consumer email experience a much richer one than exists today."
"Being able to trust and automatically render links and images is just the tip of the iceberg. Tomorrow's inbox will feature all of the functionality that advertisers currently can't deploy (but would love to) in email today - flash, Java, forms, and even video. Ultimately, certification is going to be what turns email into one of the most widely used and respected advertising vehicles in every brand's marketing mixes."
If that prediction comes true, then it's not just about freeing up time and resources otherwise spent on deliverability problems. Certification then offers far greater design and campaign creativity. Which should also benefit recipients, assuming you believe (like me) in subscriber-oriented email marketing.
Constraints
Of course, there are plenty of issues complicating widespread adoption of such certification. For example...
- adoption by marketers depends on the benefits adequately compensating for the costs of getting (and staying) certified: more on that topic here
- it requires appropriate technological / infrastructural investment and upgrades to email systems (and there are millions of organizations involved in processing incoming email). Will ISPs see enough benefit to warrant making the changes? And will they trust certification services enough to engage in the required partnerships? What about anti-spam technology vendors? And how will certification work when I have my own domain at a small ISP and use Outlook 2007 with its user-level anti-spam settings and filters?
- what happens to non-commercial and other senders of "good" bulk email without the means to "pay to play"?
- there is psychological resistance to the concept of "paying" to get email delivered
- certification standards must remain credible and enforced (so that spammers cannot get certified)
Needless to say, companies involved in certification predict a rosy future.
Industry opinion...
"The future is very bright," say Erick Mott (Director of Marketing and Corporate Communications) and Des Cahill (CEO) of Habeas, "...We're moving from an early adopter phase to mass adoption in the B2C email area."
Habeas also sees tremendous growth opportunities in the B2B world... "There is a lot of room for improved email and online business practices and this marketplace is just becoming aware of the available solutions."
Nor is this potential limited to the USA, where certification is currently strongest... "We are seeing increased interest and demand in Europe and Asia for our services and solutions. The future holds the promise of expansion from the US B2C early adopter marketplace to a much broader adoption."
A role for authentication
In essence, certification completes an email processing triangle that simplifies the whole delivery system.
Authentication identifies a sender. Certification marks that sender as a "good" sender. And reputation analysis allows that "good" status to be monitored and adjusted on an ongoing basis.
As Takahashi noted in a recent interview... "Authentication is the first baseline. Authentication lets us target and track the sender's performance and then accreditation and reputation are the metrics that let the market judge that performance."
Mott and Cahill also see a connection between the growth of authentication and reputation/certification: "At this point, 55% of email volume is using one form or another of authentication and the industry agrees that while we are at a tipping point for authentication, online reputation management adoption is the next logical step."
What do other delivery experts say?
Those outside the certification services are also positive about the future of email certification.
EmailKarma's Matt Vernhout, for example, sees it becoming "...more important over the next few years as ISPs and email recipients will be looking to these types of services to differentiate the legitimate senders from the mass volume of bot net spam (which I predict will get worse before it gets better)."
But while all agree on a growing role for certification, there is more uncertainty as to how this role will look.
Louis Chatoff, Deliverability Manager at ESP StreamSend Email Marketing, says it's hard to know exactly where certification is going...
"The dynamic has changed so much over the last year. When companies like Comcast start using Return Path to administer its feedback loop program, other ISPs are likely to align themselves with certification companies to help alleviate some of the burden of administering programs like feedback loops and whitelisting. It may become necessary to sign up (pay to play) with more than one certification company."
Mott and Cahill note, "Today a sender is certified or not. In the future, we'll see different levels of certification depending on the rigor of the certification process and programs that online reputation management services leaders like Habeas offer."
An alternative view of the future is to see certification as standardization, where the focus is on the act of meeting the standards rather than on the final stamp of approval.
Delivery expert Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise shares this view, suggesting that "...companies are going to focus more on the process and less on the certification aspect. They may even start giving away the certification free to companies who meet standards and purchase another service (monitoring or whatnot), while charging for the consulting and expertise needed for companies to meet those standards."
Whatever form future email certification and accreditation does take, it seems likely to become a major component of any high-quality email marketing program. So, as they say, watch this space.
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