Anti spamming and email marketing
Email marketing using email bulk broadcast systems such as Email Blaster has fast become the principal means for companies, charities, government departments and etc to reach their customers with information about products and services.
Used sensibly, with care taken to ensure that recipients of email marketing campaigns are willing participants who will need, or indeed welcome such email communications, email marketing is an important tool in the marketing toolbox.
It enables fast trouble free transmission of messages with images, graphics, logo’s etc and, using the more sophisticated email marketing systems available, provides statistical analysis of success; soft bounce, hard bounce, open, click on links etc. It’s also much, much cheaper than traditional mailing solutions.
But, there is a problem that can be fatal to successful bulk email marketing – spam. Everyone with an email address, particularly one that has been used for web addressing, purchases on-line etc, will be familiar with the epidemic level of spam emails. Spam is defined as unsolicited emails and it is a problem that legitimate email marketing users have to compete with. Essentially like trying to transmit a radio message through a mass of radio interference, trying to transmit a legitimate email message to customers through a sea of spam presents the same challenge.
Vigorous attempts have been made over the past few years to police the internet, to expose and eliminate identified spamming sources. Internationally, the internet fraternity has supported organisations that seek out and identify spammers and then provide a black-list to enable barring of emails from these sources.
Using a range of albeit confidential techniques including the sowing of spam traps, repeated offenders are identified and their IP’s located and blocked.
Email address lists are compiled by illicit users in a variety of ways;
- Harvesting addresses by auto scanning of websites
- Auto creating a large number of random addresses using a common organisational format – aaa@dvla.org.uk for example – particularly targeted at large corporations, government organisations etc.
It is relatively easy to locate sources of email address lists available for purchase, which are usually illegitimate lists compiled using the harvesting or creation methods such as above. That’s why purchased lists are usually barred.
Email Marketing service providers such as Email Blaster UK recognise that an effective service cannot be provided to its customers unless great care is taken to deal with the issues of competing with the spamming environment as a pro-active positive measure to help users.
All legitimate email marketing companies, particularly in the email marketing UK market adhere to anti spamming protocols; prohibit the use of purchased lists whose provenance cannot be verified, ask for confirmation that lists have been compiled using double opt-in procedures, require compliance with anti spamming regulations. However, recognising that email marketing bulk users automatically want to provide a legal, legitimate and welcomed communication with their customers but want the hassle taken care of for them, more advanced methods of dealing with anti spamming have been developed by the more pro-active email marketing software companies.
In the most sophisticated email marketing systems now available, complex software systems are included that enable email lists to be cleansed of all possible recognisable dangers of an address being a potential spam send. Removal of duplicate addresses of course; but in addition, use of complex algorithms that detect fake addresses, repeat and obviously harvested addresses and more obvious unsolicited addresses using compiled libraries.
Offering anti-spamming list scanning systems as a feature within a more advanced email marketing product, such as Email blaster’s List Doctor , is a Key Selling Feature (KSF) which provides users with confidence that their email list, even when compiled correctly from known sources, will have a high probability of achieving a high delivery rate with reduced chance of unwittingly including elicit (spam) addresses.
It is bound to be a closely guarded secret as to how systems like List Doctor work, being the result of many man years of development, but it certainly the case that aoftware systems designed to eliminate spam addresses from a list do work and do vastly improve a bulk transmissions delivery rate and acceptability performance.
