A post-spam world suggests the demise of spam, right? Wrong. I doubt we'll ever see that, despite what some industry luminaries have said. After all, spam is simply the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail, and the law doesn't prohibit that. Rather, what's been outlawed are the most egregious uses in which mailers disguise their identities and mislead recipients as to their true intent. (Of course, Can Spam sets some important ground rules, too.)
So what does a post-spam world mean? It means that the industry will move beyond spam. It means that the incidence of that annoyance will decline dramatically over the next few years. And as it does, we'll reach a point where we'll simply declare the war won. But proclaiming victory doesn't mean the job is done. The spammers always will lurk in the margins of our business, ready to spring back into action should our vigilance slip.
What this suggests to me is that the weapons used to defeat spam will stay with us too, and that they will profoundly affect the post-spam world.
So how will it be defeated? Several elements — including the law, technology and industry best practices — are converging to support two simple precepts:
- Authentication
A new standard — hopefully, just one — will emerge, making it impossible for spammers to hide their identities. Born out of a need to stop spoofing, authentication will do more than that. It will fundamentally alter the way e-mail communications work as we shift from a simple, open system to one of secure mail protocols. Authentication will not only identify the sender of an e-mail, but indicate the class of mail being sent and ultimately warrant the message itself. Think of these things in the context of Can Spam, such as the definitions of commercial e-mail and line of business, and you begin to appreciate the ramifications.
- Accountability
Once the senders of e-mail can be identified, they can then be held accountable for their performance. While there may be legal sanctions for such things as labeling and unsubscribe practices, accountability in the post-spam world will be much more far-reaching than that. The practices and performance of mailers will be evaluated and assigned a “reputation score” somewhat akin to a credit rating. This score will affect the cost of sending e-mail — directly, through a bond or e-postage; or indirectly, through denied access or poor placement. And it's this added cost of using (or abusing) the medium that will destroy spammers' business models and put most of them under. Of course, this form of accountability will affect legitimate mailers as well, especially those that can't sufficiently differentiate their practices from those associated with the spammers.
In case you hadn't guessed it, the post-spam period won't resemble the good old days of e-mail marketing. But it will be a better time than the spam-ridden one we're in now, at least for mailers with good reputation scores. For them, false positives and other deliverability concerns be will yesterday's nightmares as the ISPs begin to discard their less-than-perfect forms of filtering. And they'll find inboxes suddenly devoid of spam so customers can more readily find and act on their messages. Unfortunately, mailers with poor reputation scores will find themselves yearning for the old days. Like the spammers, they'll find it progressively more difficult and costly to capitalize on the benefits of the e-mail medium.
Nothing more dramatically illustrates the landscape of the post-spam world than to look at how the benefits of the medium will change with spam's defeat. In my mind, there are five attributes that make e-mail an extremely potent direct marketing tool. Call them the BIG I's. E-mail is:
- Inexpensive
The economics of the medium is what everyone focuses on today. E-mail is cheap. Cost is what motivates companies to migrate their customer communications to e-mail, and cost is what keeps the spammers in business. The cost of e-mail is in its creation — and even that's only a fraction of other media — not in the sending. Unlike the offline world, the incremental cost of sending doesn't increase in a linear fashion. It costs about the same to send one e-mail as it does to send the next thousand, million or 10 million.
Ever wonder how your inbox can be full of spam if the ISPs are blocking 75% of it as they claim? The answer is simple: The spammers just send more. It only takes 15 responses per million (an .0015% response rate) or less for the spammers' business model to work. That's today. Identify the spammers and change their cost of doing business, and you put them out of business.
Of course, we'd be kidding ourselves if we believed that spammers are the only ones indiscriminately blasting out e-mail. Many otherwise legitimate marketers find the medium's low cost too great a temptation to resist, and use e-mail in ways they'd never dream of doing in the offline world. They send too much too often. In today's world the math still works despite the deliverability risk of occasional ISP blocks. In a post-spam world, the medium's inexpensive nature will remain a key driver. But the cost of indiscriminate mailing practices will be much higher in terms of reduced ROI — or worse, a denial of access to the medium itself.
- Intrusive
While the consumer in me may bristle at use of this term, there's no denying that e-mail is intrusive. As a direct marketer, the intrusiveness of e-mail is important because it enables me to reach out to my audience and prompt action. Of course, the problem develops when that intrusive nature is misused, and when irrelevant — or worse, offensive and deceptive — e-mail arrives uninvited in the inbox. The medium's nature will not change in the post-spam world, but the penalties for misuse will.
- Immediate
No other medium offers the same turn-on-a-dime immediacy of e-mail. As a direct marketer I can deliver relevant messages timed precisely to when customers will be most responsive. Or I can blast out messages to meet this week's sales quota. Unfortunately, too many of today's e-mail marketers employ the latter at the expense of the former. And while their motives may differ, they use the immediacy of the medium to do hit-and-run marketing in ways not dissimilar from spammers. In a post-spam world, this will have consequences.
- Intimate
E-mail can be a highly intimate medium, enabling direct marketers to customize messages to customer preferences and behaviors. This attribute is similar to the personalization you can achieve on your Web site. Yet unlike your site, e-mail allows you to reach beyond the current online session and achieve message relevancy with customers in scale.
- Integral
Related to intimacy is the nature of the medium in building customer relationships as part of an integrated, cross-channel marketing strategy. Only a handful of marketers view e-mail in this way. In a world without spam this will become the standard, because ultimately customers will relate to your brand in the context of their total experience — online and offline — and e-mail can either enhance or detract from that experience. The e-mail medium will belong to those marketers that offer true value to their customers; recognize best practices as required practices; anticipate the post-spam world, and make changes now to ensure success.
Dave Lewis is vice president of market development at StrongMail Systems.
