It is possible to put an HTML form within an e-mail message. Many e-mail programs will allow the recipient to fill out the fields and press the submit button -- transmitting the information back to your website. The problem is that many e-mail programs disable any CGI functions. Many limit JavaScript functions, too. Moreover, they will have to connect to the Internet when they submit the form or the information won't be transmitted. Your options seem to be:

Have survey respondents reply to the e-mail, fill out answers to your survey just below your questions, and e-mail the reply message to you. Of course, you'll have to manually collate the answers, but it will work for those who read and reply to their e-mail offline.

Provide a link to a survey hosted on the Web. Participants will have to log on to the Internet, of course, and that may limit the number of participants to some degree. Incidentally, I've had very good results using SurveyMonkey.com as my survey tool.

Experiment with an HTML form delivered via e-mail. You may find that the majority of your recipients are able to respond and will go online to submit the form. But this approach will probably experience some level failure for the reasons given above. Posted by: DTB at 9:44 AM  |  Permalink

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced it has arrested and indicted dozens of spammers, Internet fraudsters, and online pirates in the largest CAN-SPAM crackdown to date. Online marketers and e-mail service providers are scrambling to revisit their policies and practices to determine just how far out of line they are with CAN-SPAM requirements.

Rather than figuring out how much you can get away with before you're visited by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), bite the bullet and get CAN-SPAM compliant. It isn't just the FTC and the DOJ you need to worry about. It's also state attorneys general, ISPs, and even power users. Most of all, it's the goodwill and reputation of your company.

Read: Getting and Staying CAN-SPAM Compliant Posted by: DTB at 9:39 AM  |  Permalink

What's the best way to manage campaign URLs in broad-based communications? Lacking real-world research, I asked in my last column for your collective wisdom on the issue. Is it better to use a campaign URL, such as www.newcampaign.com, or an extension of the brand URL, such as www.client.com/newcampaign?

You sent a wealth of input and advice. As promised, I'll share the booty. Advertiser and agency staffers sent a total of 78 responses. Overall, they reflect a preference for campaign URLs (61 out of 78).

In summary, the reasons were:

If the primary objective is to promote a brand message, use a specific URL that reflects the core idea of the brand message. People will more readily remember it and type it into the browser.


You can leverage a theme line or message in a URL to drive higher message awareness.
Names and specifics were removed, as promised. Here's what you had to say.

Read : Campaign URLs: Readers Respond Posted by: DTB at 9:36 AM  |  Permalink

Getting a legitimate e-mail marketing message to a consumer's inbox has become progressively more difficult, and with coming changes around authentication, reputation and accreditation systems, it's only going to become more complex. E-mail service providers are taking a leading role in educating both marketers and consumers about the changes, but the key to success is seen by many to be quite simple, in theory at least: marketers must send relevant messages.

"Consumers are looking at spam with a new definition. It's beyond just pornography, Viagra, or fraudulent e-mails," said Al DiGuido, Bigfoot Interactive's CEO. "In the definition of the consumer, spam is irrelevant messaging. If information is not relevant to the audience, they'll opt out, not open messages, or they won't click."

Relevance will become even more important as reputation services become more widespread. Once authentication becomes common, which is expected to happen quickly with the broad support of Sender ID, reputation and accreditation services will be layered on top to further weed out unwanted messages. Reputation and accreditation services are both designed to allow e-mail recipients to check the services' databases to get information about senders -- and therefore determine what to do with messages when they're received.

Read: In New E-mail Climate, Marketers Must Strive for Relevance Posted by: DTB at 9:34 AM  |  Permalink

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 has not solved the spam issue, but it has put a lot of hurdles in front of legitimate email marketers.

What it has really accomplished is to give the Feds the tool to prosecute—a tool that didn't exist before. That's a good thing if it cuts down on the email in my inbox and addresses the need for tight corporate filters. The real challenge is for channel marketers trying to apply "brand-wide suppression" when dealing with VARs, partners and remote sales teams.


Read: CAN-SPAM: A Headache for Channel Marketers Posted by: DTB at 9:15 AM  |  Permalink

Scientists at the bioinformatics research group at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center in New York, have developed an algorithm named Chung-Kwei that can catch nearly 97 per cent of spam.

According to New Scientist, it is based on the Teiresias algorithm, that was designed to search different DNA and amino acid sequences for recurring patterns.

The algorithm was fed 65,000 examples of known spam. Each email was treated as a long, DNA-like chain of characters. Teiresias identified six million recurring patterns in this collection, such as "Viagra".

Each pattern represented a common sequence of letters and numbers that had appeared in more than one unsolicited message. A collection of known non-spam (dubbed "ham")was run through the same process, and the patterns that occurred in both groups were removed.

Incoming email was given a score based on how many spam patterns it had. A long email that only had a few spammy sentences would get a relatively low score; but one with many patterns spread across the length of the message would score much higher.

The Chung-Kwei correctly identified 96.56 per cent test messages as being spam. Its rate of misidentifying genuine email as spam was just 1 in 6000 messages.

DNA doubles up as spam buster Posted by: DTB at 9:01 AM  |  Permalink