Google's warning, permission, relevancy and the future of email
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on July 20, 2007
A couple of posts ago we saw how Yahoo and AOL implied that they view spam as any email people don't want. The lesson: one-time permission isn't enough. Your sender reputation - your ability to get emails delivered - depends on keeping that permission. By sending relevant, useful emails.Others picked up the conversation, which goes back to an earlier debate about the value of permission in a world driven by reputation.
So much for that. Here's what Google just said in an official Gmail blog post on spam reports:
Sometimes people are afraid to report a message because they aren't sure if it is "really" spam or not. Our opinion is that if you didn't ask for it and you don't want it, it's spam to you, and it should be reported.
Not as harsh as the AOL/Yahoo comments, but again a reminder that you can cry all you like about opt-ins and legal compliance, but it won't mean anything if users report you (quite rightly from the user perspective) as spam.
As if that wasn't enough to edge us out of the comfort zone, there's a new wave of "is email dying?" articles around. The premise being that social networking sites and the communication habits of younger generations will see email fade in importance.
Many refute that prediction (see, for example, posts yesterday from Josh Nason or eROI's Dylan), and with some justification.
But we can be certain that as people face more choice in how they communicate, your emails come under increasing pressure to be heard.
The competition for attention is not just from other businesses in your field, it's from every email in the inbox, and from every other way people are trying to reach your prospect or customer.
So we have a double warning. ISPs and webmail services telling us to be relevant. And new technologies telling us to be relevant...or be ignored.
Now add in the fact that relevancy comes through targeting and targeting need not be difficult.
Result: no more excuses folks. The pressure is on!
P.S. Since we're on the subject, here are three new articles on targeting and segmentation: First Arthur Middleton Hughes and then Stefan Pollard explain how segmentation works and suggest how you can use it in your email marketing. And Spencer Kollas explains what personalization means.
Tags: email marketing, segmentation, permission
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2 Comments:
People that have a theological view of email marketing on either side always bug me. The mass mailers who feign ignorance as to why they have problems with ISPs and webmail providers on the one hand and the anti-email marketing crowd who declare everything spam on the other. I actually understand the sentiments expressed by Google and agree that, from a limited point of view on their part, those sentiments make sense.
Unfortunately, as anyone who has worked in email marketing knows, when you're sending thousands (or more) emails, people on the receiving end often highlight their entire inbox and hit "SPAM." It doesn't matter if the message was branded and if they signed up and even if they might have wanted it, they just get frustrated with an inbox 80% full of junk and report it all. Given that, the all or nothing bravado displayed in these recent comments is a little petty at best, if not just plain ignorant.
As for the email dying nonsense, that's been going on just about since I've consulted on email marketing, which is at least six years now. The people saying it now are as ridiculous as the people saying it back then, it's just that back then they got elevated all the way up to cable news networks to spew their nonsense while today they're mostly relegated to industry journals and blogs. Everyone wants to be right by making the next bold prediction, but this particular one is about as worn out as they come. The smart money would avoid opining about it at all since there's no evidence to support any opinion.
I enjoy the blog by the way, just got done reading the posts back to January.
By 
on-on, on
25 July, 2007
Thanks for dropping by on-on and for the thoughtful comments. You deserve a stiff drink after working your way through six months of posts. That's an awful lot of email marketing...
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
25 July, 2007
