Local online marketers say spam is making legitimate commercial communication through e-mail increasingly difficult because of its volume, the negative attitude towards spam, and the effect of various anti-spam measures.
This emerged at a round table on the spam problem held in Woodmead this week. The session, attended by marketers, Internet law specialists and other interested groups, focused on the issue of spam and how to combat it.
Spam is particularly a problem for legitimate companies trying to move away from the more expensive paper-based forms of communication with potential customers.
The number of daily e-mail messages sent around the world will soon be counted in the trillions, and experts believe up to 60% of that traffic will be spam. The biggest problem, they say, is that spam works with just one sale in 100 000 spam messages representing a profit.
The proliferation of spam has resulted in an increasing number of users and Internet service providers (ISPs) putting anti-spam measures in place, but up to 10% of legitimate e-mails are never received because of these automatic volume, content and blacklist-based filtering tools. Taking these factors into consideration, it is clear that e-mail is becoming increasingly inaccessible to legitimate marketers.
As the number of anti-spam procedures has increased, there has been a shift of power from marketers to ISPs and users, but Acceleration online marketing CEO Jacques van Niekerk says there are several things a legitimate marketing company can do to optimise delivery of commercial e-mail messages. He says the simplest thing marketers can do is to ensure that messages are accurate in describing what is being offered.
Van Niekerk says marketers should also be extremely wary of using third-party lists and sending thousands of indiscriminate messages. "E-mail real estate is valued more highly than normal real estate, therefore the same principles as those for postal direct mail cannot be used."
He says marketers cannot assume they have permission to communicate with people by e-mail and therefore companies should make sure that recipients of e-mail messages can easily and efficiently remove themselves from mailing lists.
Van Niekerk says a very important part of e-mail marketing is to ensure that "recency" and "frequency" are carefully managed. He says companies need to find the correct balance between communicating too often with not communicating often enough to keep the channel open.
"Finally, it is vital that marketers react promptly to any complaints about communicating through e-mail."
Van Niekerk concludes: "I believe there needs to be industry involvement from ISPs, e-mail application providers, and increased user awareness if the effects of spam on the online marketing industry are to be countered."
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