Does the average AOL subscriber know what a Goodmail CertifiedEmail icon means? Not likely. Has AOL done anything to educate consumers on what it means? Nope.
Granted, it may be difficult to get subscribers to open e-mail from their inbox providers, but this consumer inertia, like most other consumer inertia, isn’t insurmountable. How about a television ad campaign explaining what the Goodmail symbol means?
Not to pick on AOL, but the lack of consumer outreach on Goodmail CertifiedEmail is a nice example of the current schizophrenia ISPs suffer when it comes to how they treat their subscribers and the companies that mail to them: Inbox providers make almost no effort at explaining to subscribers what spam is and what subscribers can do about it, yet they reportedly use consumer complaint rates as the No. 1 determining factor when deciding whether or not to block incoming messages.
Consumers have been trained not to use unsubscribe links offered by marketers for fear the action will cause their addresses to be passed along to spammers. Rather, they’ll report the e-mail as spam to the ISPs because they trust the inbox provider to block further e-mail and not to share their addresses.
Moreover, it is commonly known in e-mail marketing circles that people will complain even though they opted in. Report-spam buttons are not serving anyone’s purposes.
As a result, ISPs should do one of two things: severely lessen the weight given to “this is spam” reports from subscribers, or work harder to educate them on what spam is, and give them more reporting options.
Richard Gingras, chief executive of Goodmail Systems, proposed last week at the Inbox conference in San Jose that rather than give consumers a “this-is-spam” button, give them a complaint button with a number of options, such reporting when they think a mailer is sending too much or is no longer relevant to their needs.
“You want to get a better sense of why they’re unsubscribing,” he said. Marketers would certainly welcome that information.
Microsoft, however, takes a more streamlined philosophy over what should appear in consumers’ inboxes.
“In general we believe that if it’s in the inbox, there shouldn’t be any icons,” said Craig Spiezle, director, technology care and safety, Microsoft. “The desired state is that if it’s in the inbox, it should be considered safe and trustworthy mail. If you start putting multiple icons, the complexity that you’re putting on the user is unrealistic. You risk having the inbox look like a race car with all those logos.”
Fair enough, but then the ISPs shouldn’t rely on those consumers to give an accurate picture of what is hitting their inboxes. And they should stop holding marketers to seemingly arbitrary complaint thresholds.
Given the current state of confusion and ignorance in the marketplace, letting consumer complaints determine when a mailer should be blocked makes as much sense as allowing the ignoramuses in the Utah and Michigan legislatures to pass industry-crushing e-mail laws that claim to protect kids from adult spam, yet actually put them in more danger.
Oops, never mind.
