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