There is not a day that goes by without a dealer calling me and asking about her emails and SPAM. It’s a valid concern considering that over 59% of all emails sent are unsolicited and there are harsh penalties, both community-driven and governmental, that sometimes are not reversible. Unlike humans, computers that flag your email as SPAM have ridiculously long memories and some people never get off the infamous blacklist that limits all communication from email addresses or even mail servers themselves. Let’s take a few moments and discuss the various causes and effects then we’ll finish up with some suggestions on how to keep the mail flowing.
What is SPAM?
In layman’s terms, SPAM is simply email that was not requested. Unlike telemarketing, email marketing seems to have a very liberal guidelines as to when or how often you should send email to prospects. Of course, everyone has their own opinion and the Government has passed legislation which attempts to formalize the rules (with typical Government inefficiency) but the real power in this game is the big email server owners. The AOL’s, Yahoo’s and Hotmail’s of the World create, enforce, manage and change the rules at will and often they move to their own beat without any coordination. Yahoo and Microsoft even went so far as to create their own anti-spam technology which all senders must adopt to send mail to their users. An immense amount of power is really now concentrated in a very small group of hands and you and I have really no choice but to dance to their tune.
Why do people care?
Without stating the obvious facts about cluttered email boxes, let’s just look at the economic costs of SPAM to these big email companies and little firms alike. SPAM can carry viruses, overwhelms system architecture and slow the entire Internet to a virtual crawl. Companies spend over $200 billion dollars a year on tech support, special equipment to detect these messages and repairing the damage to their customers and employees directly from SPAM. Nuclear facilities have been compromised from SPAM viruses, untold megabytes of user data has been lost and every day some retired people lose their life savings to scams conveyed via SPAM. In terms of money SPAM is a huge problem that makes junk mail or telemarketing look like walks in the electronic park.
As if the huge monetary cost was not enough reason to hate SPAM, remember that now it’s often what first introduces our kids to pornography, interrupts our family time by making the Blackberry vibrate for no reason and is the single largest reason that people mistrust the Internet as a whole. Imagine someone driving up and down your block screaming profanity out of a bullhorn 24 hours a day seven days a week and then you can imagine the effect of SPAM on our social fabric and morality. We doubt everything now and even the most innocent email is now subject to investigation by electronic sensors that although noble in purpose are often lacking in execution.
Testing, testing testing…
OK folks now imagine for a minute that you are an email server, I know this is hard. Now imagine some geek in San Francisco programs you to watch for SPAM. Do you think it would be natural for the software he creates to look for patterns? Patterns are very important as you understand the way these systems work and when you send test emails to your own account over and over you are in fact marking your own account as a SPAM sender. I know you mean well, but you are hurting your own deliverability rates by doing this stuff.
How do you make sure your email is delivered?
Well, let’s start with the obvious: Don’t SPAM your customers. Now I know, you don’t SPAM your customers, after all they requested some info back in 1993 and all you are doing is following up (for 14 years). Just remember that newsletters, specials, free hot dogs or the kids fingerprint picture day are all non-requested emails for the most part. Sure some of your customers have asked for this to be sent to them but the vast majority have not and it’s really just a fishing expedition. By sending these wantonly you are increasing the likelihood that your real emails will never reach the customers. Remember, email servers can block the “from” email address very easily and it’s nearly impossible to change once it’s happened.
Most ISP’s (Earthlink, Gmail etc) that receive mail from iMagicLab know us and they know that the vast majority of our users do not abuse the email system. Just because they know we’re legitimate doesn’t mean that they don’t watch us very carefully (we do after all have millions of email addresses in our system). More importantly they watch each and every message you send and dynamically compare them against an enormous list of rules (84,000 lines and counting) which help them decide whether to ban the entire email, deliver it to the bulk mail folder or let it proceed to the inbox as intended. Here are some helpful rules to email by:
· Be careful with the words you use in your emails, words like “free”, “special” or “Viagra” are likely to send your email to cyber-nowhere faster than you can press send.
· Never use more than one typeface or a color of text other than the default black color. How often do personal communications use red huge words that say “limited time only”?
· REMOVE people from your mailings that ask to be removed. If you get a response from their server saying your message is blocked, or if you have even a hint that she doesn’t want mail from you anymore take them off your list. Every time you resend an email to someone who has told their mail server it’s SPAM you reduce your entire ability to send email to that SYSTEM completely.
· Don’t use too many pictures in an email or links to more than one website. They measure the ratio of images to text along with the other rules to see if your email is likely to be SPAM.
· Never ever buy, rent or borrow a mailing list from someone to use as a broadcast email source. These systems are not stupid, 5000 emails all with the same subject line or body text hits their servers they know exactly what you are doing. Further they watch whether a customer has ever sent an email “to” you as part of the calculation. Repeated emails to folks that are ignoring you or marking your emails as SPAM will result in AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft blocking you completely.
· My point above actually also applies to over-broadcasting email messages to your existing customer or prospect base. Remember it’s not enough to have good intentions to inform folks about the sale happening every Thursday on customized keychains. Make sure your customers have requested the information and specifically opted in to your marketing emails or you will be blocked.
The end result here is that, just like in phone calls, there is a limit to what you can do by email. It’s very easy for prospects to mark your mail as SPAM and far simpler than you can imagine to get your dealership blacklisted by the email G*d’s. Once you are blacklisted, or blocked, your real communications won’t get through, you will no longer have the ease that email provides in the transaction and your dealership will likely have to change domain names (i.e. smithmotors.com) to fix the problem. It’s just not worth the cost, stay focused and work your active pipeline with targeted specific email campaigns that both inform and respect users wishes. Make sure your team has templates and (gasp) processes in place to prevent abuse and above all remember that no matter how hard you try to evade the SPAM trap the only real way is to not SPAM at all.
OK, Now let’s go sell some cars by creating relationships and offering real value in all communications.
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