OTA Proposes Online Trust Principles

In our recent webinar with the FTC we confirmed that the agency is open to continued industry self-regulation – as long as they see some action. I suspect that like me, most of us in the email industry prefer the self regulation ideal. We took the opportunity with our conversation with the FTC to point out many examples of how our industry works together to build and maintain trust in email with consumers.

We continue to have an opportunity as service providers and industry associations, to lead our industry by setting and adopting realistic best practices guidelines that businesses can implement. The email and advertising industries are graced with numerous agencies and associations doing just that, including the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), the Direct Marketing Association, the Email Experience Council, the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, Network Advertising Initiative and the Internet Advertising Bureau, to name a few. Each of these existing industry associations have produced best practice guidance that has resonated with us and helped us manage our businesses properly. The latest effort comes from the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) who has just released a timely draft of Online Trust Principles for public comment.

The thing about any set of principles, and these from the OTA are no exception …

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Episode #9 of Reputation Radio is LIVE!

Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.

In our first segment we interview Return Path’s Margaret Farmakis and Stephanie Colleton about their study of email practices by some top US retailers. Then, in our Cool Email Ideas segment Margaret shares a great example of fun (and funny!) transactional messaging from CD Baby.

Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? …

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Permission is Not Enough

A digital marketer in France said to me the other day, “I don’t need to worry about inbox deliverability, I have permission.” I was shocked that this myth could be so firmly held by an otherwise smart and savvy email marketer. “Do you stop trying to earn a second sale just because you made the first?” I said. “Doesn’t what you send and how you treat subscribers after they give you permission have anything to do with subscriber satisfaction?” He paused, and then agreed.

After all, it’s subscriber satisfaction, not permission, that earns our place in the inbox and gives us a chance for a response and revenue. And subscriber satisfaction is all about the experience we create with every message, over time.

Consider that …

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We Are All In the Digital Publishing Business

At this week’s DPAC III event three hundred publishers, brand advertisers, agencies and technology solution providers gathered to discuss the state of the digital publishing industry. The content was great and the conversations very thought provoking.

Key takeaways for me, along with links to the Digiday Daily blog posts that I wrote from the show floor:

The new consumer priority is saving, not spending. Marketers must adjust our messaging and channel strategy to engage with consumers who value savings, quality and collaboration when buying. The “I want” culture is shifting to a “We need” mentality. …

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New Return Path Research Study: Subscriber Experiences in the United Kingdom

I’m pleased to announce today the release of our newest research study: Creating Subscriber Experiences That Maximise Returns for UK Marketers.

We’ve spent a good amount of time in the past year studying the subscriber experiences created by top brands in the U.S. First was our Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?, which looked at sign up, welcome messages, targeting techniques and more. We followed that up with a look at the experience created by the same companies when subscribers chose to opt out of receiving email in Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After “Unsubscribe Me.” And finally, our study on Increasing Revenues by Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers looked at how some of the top retailers in the U.S. handle email for buyers versus non-buyers and some of the tactics they use in their transactional messaging.

So this year we decided to turn some of our attention to the experience for email subscribers outside the U.S. We’ve said before that marketing in Europe is neither ahead nor behind the U.S. – it’s just different. This new study certainly proves that point. U.K. marketers aren’t doing demonstrably better or worse than their American counterparts. But they are definitely missing opportunities to improve their results with email marketing.

A few key findings …

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Press Release: 85 Per Cent of Email Marketers in the UK Collect Personal Data Yet Fail To Use It

Two In Five Firms Shun Their Online Customers

New research today reveals that UK companies are collecting personal and demographic data on their email subscribers but fail to use it.

The report, Creating Subscriber Experiences That Maximise Returns for UK Email Marketers, from Return Path, the world’s leading email deliverability services company, also shows that UK organisations are failing to follow email marketing best practice and risk generating spam complaints – even from subscribers who have specifically requested to receive messages. This can lead to ISPs blocking all messages from that organisation, significantly damaging the effectiveness of their email marketing strategies.

Personal Data

The report shows that 85 per cent of companies that collect personal data on subscribers fail to use this valuable information to make their marketing messages and offers more relevant to individuals. …

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How to Steal Reputation

Much as the term “pre-header” is now locked into email marketing parlance even though what it describes is neither pre- nor header, the term “reputation hijacking” continues to spread through the anti-spam community and the press.

“Reputation hijacking” is intended to describe when a spammer or other bad actor uses someone else’s system — usually one of the large webmail providers — to send their spam. The idea is that in doing so, they’re hijacking the reputation of the webmail provider’s IPs instead of risking the reputation of IPs under their own control. But I really have to laugh (though mostly out of sadness) whenever this technique is described as something new.

The first spam I dealt with, way back in the mid-nineties, was sent by a user on a shell server. So was nearly all of the other spam of that era. Some was sent via Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc., but it was all from what today we’d call an individual end user’s email account.

Then some of the spammers realized they could get dedicated servers — and that worked for a while. …

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FTC Comfortable with Email Regulatory Progress. So Far.

The new chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission took office with the Obama administration in January. However, Chairman Jon Leibowitz and many of his key deputies have been with the agency for years, so much of the work continues seamlessly. In a DMA/Email Experience Council webinar last week, Peder Magee, Esq., FTC Privacy and Theft attorney in the Bureau of Consumer Protection said, “The FTC is bipartisan and works on consensus. Typically things are done with unanimous vote. We’ve had a fair amount of consistency from where we’ve been.”

For now, that stance seems to suggest that the self regulation of the industry is working. Magee noted that some concepts “transcend the medium” when it comes to self regulation. “Transparency, prominent notice, use of personal data, and providing the ability to opt out easily” all are areas the FTC continues to watch.

Certification and feedback loop programs were noted by panelist Tom Bartel, CPO of Return Path, as an example of how the industry cooperates in order to make self regulation work. Especially for certification programs, “Email marketers put themselves forward voluntarily to be held to high standards,” Bartel says. “Including the things Peder listed about prominence. Once they are vouched for by the third party, the ISPs can make good decisions about what to do with email from those senders.

“Participation in these programs shows marketers are willing …

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Live from the Email Insider Summit: Tactics that Work Now

Despite the fact that Bear Stearns had already collapsed, the recession was not even discussed at last May’s Email Insider Summit. This year, the world looks a bit different, and many marketers here are telling me that they’ve had to change their practices significantly in order to adjust to the new reality. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it seems many of us are more focused on subscriber satisfaction, retention and keeping ISP complaints low.

A panel of smart email marketers on Monday that was moderated by Mediapost editor David Goetzl, highlighted some great strategies that are working for them right now. Bottom line: email is now the rockstar of the marketing team. Bravo! Good for us. Um … uh oh. Now we better perform! I’ve tried to summarize some of the panelists key strategies here.

For more live blogging from me and others at the event, check out the Mediapost Raw Blog or follow all of us on Twitter using #MPEIS. (My Twitter is @StephanieSAM).

Brian Jaffe, Director, eCommunications for Nationwide said, “Retention is the new acquisition for us …

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One New Name, Two Levels of Trust

We have some exciting news to share today about certification services from Return Path.

We have incorporated two different programs – Sender Score Certified and SafeList (formerly from Habeas) – into one program called Return Path Certification. By combining these two programs, Return Path has developed the largest and most respected whitelist program in the email universe that is based on this key premise – if you can trust the sender, you can trust their mail.

For senders to participate in the program, they need only complete one application to be considered for Return Path Certification’s two levels of trust – Safe and Certified. To gain entry to our Safe level, senders must pass an audit of their email permission practices, privacy policy and legal compliance and show that they only send email from properly configured and authenticated servers. Then, companies whose reputation metrics identify them as “the best of the best” qualify for an automatic upgrade to the Certified level and gain access even more inboxes for no extra charge. Certified members also get special privileges like automatically enabled images and links at Windows Live Mail. …

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