Email certification: the future
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on July 07, 2008
Rounding off the mini-series on certification and accreditation is a look at what the future holds.In this article, certification services and deliverability experts give their views of this future.
I see certification as unavoidable in the long-term, if you're running a high-quality email marketing program. But the article raises various issues, including the role of certification for those bulk email senders that don't have ready cash to "pay to play" (like non-profits or hobby discussion lists).
If you have any comments on these issues -- or if you disagree with the basic premise that certification is the future of email marketing -- do take the opportunity to comment.
Tags: email certification, email accreditation, certified email
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2 Comments:
I think one of the biggest barriers to adoption of certification programs by ISPs is the marketing of these programs as "guaranteed inbox delivery," or similar claims. ISPs don't want to give up that much control; they need to continue to be able to react to their users' needs & desires.
Senders, on the other hand, appear to only care about guaranteed inbox delivery. They don't seem to want to think about incremental improvements; they want it all, and they want it now, and nothing else will do.
If that mismatch of expectations can be resolved, I'd predict that we'll see certification move even further towards helping ISPs & filtering companies make more informed decisions, rather than the old-style blunt instrument that's expected to override everything else.
As an extreme example: a certification program for adult sites could certify that a particular mailer is an adult site and follows best practices, but can't predict whether all recipients want to receive adult material. So, the ISP can combine that program with other things they know about the recipient -- such as whether they're over 18 -- when deciding what to do with a message.
The future is indeed rosy for certifiers, but only if the industry stops lying about what certification means. Otherwise, we'll be stuck in a holding pattern.
(This is just me talking, not my employer.)
By 
J.D., on
07 July, 2008
Thanks for the thoughtful comment J.D.
The wider challenge there then is to get marketers to see things more from the perspective of the recipient (subscriber) and receiver (ISPs etc.)
A problem with that is that despite the more enlightened approach of parts of the marketing community, there are always going to be those who, as you say, "want it all, and they want it now"
By 
, on
08 July, 2008
