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E-mail marketing has proved to be a winning communications tool but, as internet security is stepped up, will your e-mail survive the spam filters and corporate firewalls?
E-mail marketing is burgeoning and it's not hard to understand why. Speed, cost effectiveness and good response rates have all made the humble e-mail an extremely popular marketing tool. A survey conducted in 2004 by digital company IPT revealed that 92 per cent of marketing professionals include e-mail in their marketing mix. More than 50 per cent said they intended to increase their spend in 2005.
But there's a fly in the e-mail marketing ointment. Deliverability is harder than ever to achieve, thanks to a barrage of global spam and virus attacks, corporate firewalls and dirty e-mail data. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and corporate firewalls in particular are stopping spammers in their tracks, but the catch is that legitimate e-marketing is getting caught up in the same net.
ISPs are stepping up their spam filtering efforts, one of the most recent being Microsoft's Sender ID policy. It authenticates the source of an e-mail by checking that the sender's IP address (which identifies the location of a computer on a network) and its e-mail address are linked.
As bounce-backs are not guaranteed, e-marketers can be left in the dark about whether or not their e-mails have reached their destination. Mike Parry, sales director at IPT, says about 20 per cent of legitimate e-mails are not delivered. So how can this be rectified?
Paying careful attention to the content of an e-mail is the first step. "We have seen some over-enthusiastic and racey marketing copy being mistakingly identified as inappropriate or dubious content," comments Denis Sheehan, CEO of e-mail marketing bureau CheetahMail UK.
Guy Marson, CEO of e-mail marketing company Mailtrack, adds: "There are certain things that might make your e-mail get caught in a spam filter. The question 'what sex are you?' is a good example."
Other triggers include excessive use of bold capitals, particular fonts and white spaces between characters. Even certain colours are looked upon less favourably. "A blue background for example can score a higher rating than a white background," says Justin Anderson, CEO of digital marketing agency Frontwire.
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