On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere made his midnight ride to warn of the British invasion forces. But while this date is known in greater Boston as “Patriots Day” and the rest of the country as the date of the Boston Marathon, there is another foreign invasion that may later resonate for email marketers: May 5, 2010.
On that date, for the first time in the history of the Internet, non-Latin characters were allowed within a domain name. In a press release announcing these changes, Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN, the international authority that manages all domain addresses, noted that more than 50% of Internet users weren’t born using Latin letters. This advance, he added, means they can participate in the Internet in their native language and native scripts.
The first three countries to take advantage of this improvement were Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And on June 25, Chinese language characters were added, opening up native language URLs and email addresses to roughly a billion people.
The fancy name for this change is “Internationalized Domain Names” or, to use its more easily pronounced initials, IDN. And the list of approved IDNs keeps growing and growing. Right now, only the “domain” (the part of the email address after the @ sign) can support other character sets, but there are already proposals to open up the change to handles as well.
So what?
Marketers who primarily focus on customers who were born and raised using the letters A to Z (the tech guys call that ASCII), might feel they don’t have anything to worry about. Yet.
But I’m sure you know people who weren’t born speaking English. If they could get an email address in their own character set, don’t you think some of them would? Now think about your future markets, population trends, and your own growth plans. We’re at the very beginning of an email revolution.
Recognizing Internationalized Domain Names
Here are some examples provided by ICANN of the email address ‘[email protected]’ in some of the recently approved character sets:
And if your system can’t handle the characters internally, there is a way to convert them to ASCII. Here’s the first three of those email addresses again, converted:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Of course, this gives rise to a challenge to marketers, who can no longer trust their eyes or brains to recognize “valid” email addresses, as all three of those examples are just as good as something at Hotmail.com. In fact, they could be the working email addresses of their best three customers!
Next steps
· Rethink your own preconceptions about the appearance and structure of valid email addresses. Don’t just delete addresses that “look funny”—they may be simply in other character sets.
· Reach out to your tech team and service providers. Key questions include whether your systems are ready for IDNs, whether anyone in your circle has seen any yet, and—perhaps most important—whether your Web site signup forms can handle IDNs.
Austin Bliss is president and co-founder of FreshAddress Inc.
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