The new blacklist
May 6th, 2008 • Posted by Larry Donahue • Permalink
Starting in the late 40s and going into the 60s, the "Hollywood blacklist" consisted of directors, screenwriters, actors and musicians who couldn't get work because of their real or suspected political affiliations. Being placed on the blacklist was a death knell for a career.
These days, we're fighting a different kind of blacklist — those managed by companies like AOL, Yahoo!, Comcast, EarthLink and others. Once your company gets on the blacklist, it is almost as hard as a 1950s actor to get off. And, the results are similar: if you're blacklisted as a spammer, your email will not flow. With so much of our lives conducted online now, being blacklisted on the Internet is a serious blow to your business.
It's hard to blame these large Internet companies for being aggressive with spam. With spam accounting for 70.1% of all email in the U.S. in April 2008, consumers get very angry with their Internet company when they receive too much spam. Desperation is one word to describe the actions of these Internet companies — they are responsible for handling billions of emails every day, and every day it becomes harder to combat the spam.
How does your company become blacklisted? It's easier than you might think, if you send email:
- To someone you don't have a relationship with;
- When you haven't obtained permission from the recipient;
- When the person you're sending email to forgets they gave you permission, and reports your email as spam; or
- When the person you're sending email to shares their email account with someone else (i.e. a spouse), and that other person reports your email as spam.
This problem has gotten so bad that the anti-spam measures large Internet companies are starting gobble up legitimate email. For example, AT&T implemented new spam filters that deleted legitimate email, with no warning or notice to their customers.
So, email is losing its effectiveness as a marketing tool because it's easy to get blacklisted. Even if you're not blacklisted, most Internet companies are using aggressive spam filtering techniques which may be filtering much of your email — without telling you or otherwise giving you any clue what's happening on the Internet between you and your clients.
SpaBoom is trying to do its part by helping you stay off the blacklists. When a consumer purchases an IGC from you, they can "opt-in" to your email marketing. This "opt-in" is unchecked, and requires the consumer to check this box to actually opt-in. If you are using SpaBoom's newsletter feature and you import email addresses into the database (or you add new clients manually), SpaBoom will send a confirmation email to all imported email addresses, asking the recipient to verify they wanted to be added to your mailing list.
Yes, these new measures are aggressive and may reduce the overall size of your email lists contained within SpaBoom. They will, however, help ensure your business stays off the blacklists and that your email is more effective overall.
Posted in SpaBoom New Features, Spa Marketing, General • Share • Trackback
May 6th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
This is great. Customers should opt-in and pass through more than one gateway to ensure that they want to receive your communications. In addition, make it easy for the customer to unsubscribe. Finally, and most importantly, use a provider that is an expert in the technical details to configuring email and help you evaluate your content to ensure that it will not be identified as spam.
May 7th, 2008 at 5:13 am
Spam is the bane of my existence. That being said, I can understand how people may not appreciate it when we send our email specials. That is why we set up our website where people can join our email list. I set it up to automatically send new email guests to our email software program (I won't name the company I use out of respect for SpaBoom) which has arrangements with the major players to allow email through. I still have yet to find anything that brings as fast a response as a well-written email (ours is 32 seconds from when I hit send to getting the first call).
May 8th, 2008 at 4:55 am
THANK YOU SpaBoom for shining light on this AT&T and spam blocking mess. I too have been a recent victim of AT&T changing the rules of the email game and not once notifying me in advance. I had clients showing up for appointments that I knew nothing about because my email notices were getting dumped into the spam filter all of a sudden. Plus, when I tried to send out emails, I was told my previously good password was now bad and the server did not know me anymore. I have also just read about this AT&T SBC Global changes with no warning in an Apple-Mac online newsletter and they too mentioned the lack of telling customers in advance, resulting a sheer havoc created in many people's businesses and personal lives. Problem is, with the limited choices in internet providers we are pretty much stuck with AT&T broadband or Charter Cable who is no better. Appreciate you staying ahead of the game to keep us advised of these problems and providing pro-active fixes.