Sometimes it seems like everybody

Sometimes it seems like everybody’s putting up roadblocks for e-mail direct marketing campaigns.

There’s the federal government, of course, with its Can-Spam restrictions on e-mail content and behavior: a valid postal address for each e-mail; a clear indication of advertisement in the subject line; and a functional opt-out mechanism, and the will to abide by it. But as tough as e-mail marketers may consider those rules to be, up to 90% of all U.S. e-mail is still spam, according to MessageLabs. Researcher IDC forecasts that 12 billion pieces of it will be mailed in 2005.

To help shelter their customers from the spam storm, big Internet service and e-mail providers such as America Online, MSN, and Yahoo have taken it upon themselves to install spam filters. SpamCop, Spamhaus, SenderBase and SpamAssassin are some of the most popular. Many of these apply much more stringent rules for deciding if a message is spam or not.

Brian Klais, vice president of eBusiness for online marketing agency NetConcepts, points out that these filters are blocking up to 20% of legitimate e-mails, and that a 2003 Roper poll found 38% of consumers reported that wanted e-mails were being filtered out. Small businesses trying to bring sales offers to current or permitted customers need to keep those filters in mind when they’re designing an e-mail campaign.

To complicate things, each of the major spam filters operates by a slightly different set of rules. Klais offers a few general tips that will better your chances of slipping through the spam nets:

* Include a real name, not merely an e-mail address, in the “from” line. Include some lower-case letters too, and don’t end that line with a number. In the “to” line, listed the recipient’s e-mail address, and don’t use either the carbon copy or blind carbon copy lines. Such copies are always sent in a single blast, a tactic abused by spammers. Small e-mail marketers should opt for a program that will send the e-mails out individually. (NetConcepts offers GravityMail, but there are many others.)

* Looks count— against you. Watch the amount of HTML code in your message. Most of these filters assume that lots of HTML equals spam; and ISPs are getting very aggressive about blocking images in e-mail. Microsoft FrontPage makes it easy to create HTML content: so easy, in fact, that many filters are set to detect the type of metatags that FrontPage embeds and send that content to the spam folder. Other design elements that say “spam” to a filter are thick borders around your message, the use of red or green type, and colored backgrounds. And don’t make the whole message one big image, a very popular spam tactic to keep copy from being scanned.

* Test to make sure your e-mails are making it through the filters of the prominent ISPs. Many small e-mailers neglect this step, Klais says, especially if they’re trying to run their own e-mail campaign. But even the smallest can set up 10 or 20 trial messages and get a sense of the deliverability of a message. They should check into bounce rates, too. Hard bounce rates (that is, not just “out of office” replies) higher than 10% or open rates below 30% may indicate that your network or e-mail vendor has been blacklisted by the ISPs.

* Spammers eventually figure out ways to beat the filters, and the filters adapt to those tricks. That makes their rules a moving target for legitimate e-mailers. Recognize that what works to get you delivered today may get you discarded tomorrow.

* Don’t put the recipient’s name in the subject line. Even if the filters don’t trash it, many people have set their own e-mail filters to discard messages that put their names in the subject line. Instead, try to customize the content to some degree, by referring to a previous purchase or talking about a customer’s account. Customizing is one thing spammers never do.

In fact, Klais suggests that a lot of the direct marketing tactics that experience has proven successful in mail are exactly the ones to get your e-mail thrown out of the game. Personalizing the message with “Dear So-and-So”, putting the offer up front in the subject line, or simply using the word “free!” too much can get you marked as spam. It’s great that you’re excited over your special offers. But you need to remember that spammers get excited too, and they’ve ruined it for everyone. Calm down.

The biggest adjustment e-mail marketers need to make may be the psychological one. “Classic direct marketing principles in e-mail channels are becoming more risky,” Klais says. “Spammers have taken classic plays out of the direct marketers’ playbook: benefit-laden subject lines, benefits and calls to action in the message body.” You may think personalizing the message with “Dear So-and-So”, putting the offer up front in the subject line, or simply using the word “free” a lot will get you a high open rate. In fact, it may guarantee that your message never gets seen at all.

By co-opting those DM tools from the offline world, spammers have ruined them for everyone. “Marketers need to move toward a more low-key, relationship-centric message when using e-mail,” Klais says. “I don’t think that shift come naturally to many direct marketers.”