Emeryville, CA, April 5, 2006--It's evident that anti-spam filtering has improved over the past several years, according to Teney Takahashi, a market analyst at the Radicati Group.
Instead of simply searching for keywords--Viagra, Rolex--today's filters use statistical reasoning, Takahashi noted, potentially leading to "a higher degree of accuracy and therefore a lower rate of false positives."
E-mail marketers anxious to see that their opt-in mailings are not mistaken for spam are finally seeing brighter days, new research suggests. While the journey to the customer's inbox is getting easier, however, passive marketers will face tough challenges from smart competitors who are quickly learning how to use e-mail tracking, metrics and customization for high returns.
ISPs and marketers are, more than ever, on the same page in terms of serving opt-in e-mail receivers. Both are focused on making sure that opt-ins get what they want. Nobody can deny that the opt-in's inbox journey has been rocky--trampled on by spam-sniffing software unleashed to resolve the real junk-mail crisis. ISPs and marketing executives are trying harder to figure out how to reach those who choose to get information while continuing the fight against spam.
"The ISPs have been incredibly forthcoming and cooperative working with industry groups such as The Email Sender & Provider Coalition," said David Daniels, research director, JupiterResearch. "Such efforts have improved the understanding--and, in some cases, the cooperative adoption--of things such as SPF, SenderID and Domainkeys."
After all, e-mail as a marketing tool is in theory one of the best yet devised. If you are a marketer, why spend big bucks on a limited number of snail mail postings when you can send so many more by e-mail at a fraction of the cost? Why wait for snail-mail feedback when you get immediate feedback and orders online? Why put up with outdated mailing lists or depend on printers' schedules that cannot keep up with new product announcements?
Sooner than you could say "click through," opt-in lists were born and company newsletters were launched. Invitations for customer feedback, event signups and purchases took off.
So, what did go wrong with e-mail marketing in practice? In a word, spam.
Information overload and e-mail user fatigue have also come into play. E-mail broadcast campaigns going out to many faceless recipients with no real pulse on their segmented buying interests have not scored well. A countermovement grew up of software vendors promising to fight the e-mail deluge with e-mail filters.
The trouble is, marketers with lists of earnest opt-ins and their opt-in prospects both suffered. While anti-spam technology was a breakthrough, the false-positives--e-mail filtered incorrectly, sniffed out as spam and blocked--were a genuine headache for marketers.
In 2006, however, the picture is changing. Deliverability rates in e-mail were looking better as of Q4 2005, found Lyris Technologies, an e-mail marketing software and services company. The combined average gross deliverability rate for permission-based e-mails rose by 2 percent, from 87 percent in the third quarter of 2005 to 89 percent in Q4.
Best-of-class ISPs are less likely to block opt-in mail, Lyris also learned. Users with one of the top ten U.S. service providers were 21 percent more likely to get their opt-in mail successfully than those using the bottom 10 providers: 97.5 percent versus 76.4 percent, according to the Lyris "ISP Deliverability Report Card."
