For creating eye-rolling boredom among anyone who did not attend CalTech, there’s nothing like a discussion of e-mail standards. But direct marketers—and in particular, small businesses who want to take advantage of e-mail’s unique capabilities to reach customers interested in their products—should pay attention to the discussion now moving forward about how to make e-mail a trusted, reliable channel for marketing communication again.
That’s the opinion of Margaret Olson, chief technology officer for e-mail service provider Constant Contact, which specializes in permission-based e-mail marketing for small and medium businesses. She spoke both at the FTC’s e-mail authentication summit in Washington, D.C., in mid-November and at the InBox East e-mail conference in Atlanta week later. And she says she’s disturbed by the lack of understanding of the plight of small businesses who don’t want to become e-mail experts—they just want to reach their markets.
“The discussions have been quite technical, and many of the people involved have unrealistic expectations about what small businesses can do to protect e-mail, and their level of expertise in and understanding of the technologies involved,” Olson says. The “wizards” put forth to help set up authentication —user interfaces that marketers will supposedly use to police their own mailings-- have been aimed at more at service providers than small businesses.
Olson told both the FTC summit attendees and the InBox gathering that e-mail vendors must be able to agree on common approaches to security that can be conveyed clearly and simply to small entrepreneurs who want to use e-mail. ‘I spoke to others who serve the small business community about the need to get our messaging together and to use common language and common approaches to guide small businesses through this process,” she says.
By the estimate of the Direct Marketing Association, of the $33 billion in sales that came from legitimate e-mail in 2003, $8 billion went to small businesses. That sales channel is now in jeopardy, thanks to abuses such as spam and phishing identity scams.
After some wrangling the e-mail service industry now seems to be moving to institute some form of authentication technology quickly—something to prove that a piece of e-mail really did come from the address, and thus the sender, that it purports to. As a result, Olson says, all small businesses should be starting to think about whether their vendors support these standards.
“Vendor expertise in this area is going to matter a great deal to small businesses,” she says. “All these proposals work by publishing something in the domain name servers, and that’s beyond the expertise of most small entrepreneurs. They will prefer to keep their involvement to a high level and ask only two questions: one, who the vendors are who send mail on their behalf; and two, whether those vendors support authentication.” Constant Contact currently supports SenderID authentication, developed by Microsoft with a third party developer, and will soon support the Domain Keys solution espoused by Yahoo. “Our plan is to support all the standards as quickly as possible,” Olson says.
Authentication is the “dial tone” of e-mail security, Olson points out—the first step in a longer chain of innovation, like getting phone service turned on. Once an identifying tag is attached to a piece of e-mail, a higher form of security known as accreditation will quickly follow. “When that happens, ISPs will have tools something like a credit score by which to differentiate between good mailers and spammers,” she says. “Once the market understands that this will restore consumer trust in e-mail, they will be big fans of authentication.”
