28 SEA GLOBE

By Christian Cotroneo

Hands on: not being identified asspam is crucial in email marketing

You’ve got mail: the daily barrage of unwanted messages can turn off potential customers

Tap dance: Companies can end up spending a lot of time losing the spam label

Somewhere in the heart of Africa, a deposed princess needs your help.

You see, her father’s bank ac-counts have been frozen by a

corrupt dictator. But if you send your ac-count number, she may be able to transfer her vast wealth to you.

Heard that one before?Welcome to the inbox.While the Nigerian scam has faded into

the annals of spam lore, there’s always a fresh drama waiting here. And for the most part, we don’t give it a chance.

Burmese orphans? Delete. Need cash for a kidney transplant? Delete.

Email hardens a man – even to good news.

You won the Brunei National Lottery. Delete.

Not even apparent emergencies raise much of a pulse these days – you know, when your bank sends you a message, claiming your ac-count has been compromised, and would you mind emailing it back to the strangely not bank-like address?

It all makes for a difficult, if not down-right hostile, environment for companies trying to deliver legitimate marketing messages to potential customers. Over the years, the line between spam and email marketing has become razor-thin, spawning an entire industry of specialists to help businesses walk it.

So how does a company lure customers, without coming off as spam?

“It’s the most important question to ask and it’s the most important topic to approach,” says Jonah Kadish, owner of Bangkok-based internet marketing firm DeeMoc. “If you’re doing anything closely related to spam, you’re ruining your brand and not getting the results you want.”

At first glance, Kadish’s guide, entitled

“The other definition of spam is anything the recipient doesn’t want.”

And that’s why getting potential custom-ers to opt-in for newsletters and other email communications is so crucial.

For all the trendy internet marketing tools out there – from ‘search engine optimisa-tion’ to social networking sites – the most powerful building block for communicating remains simple, sturdy email.

“It’s not a sexy technology, and not some-thing that’s new to anybody really,” Kad-ish says. “But it is your workhorse. It’s your foundation for pushing traffic back to your website … and generating more money and interest for your business.”

The advantages of email are numerous. For

“Analyzing Email Statistics” reads like a spammer’s bible. He uses terms like “click-through rates,” “bounce reports” and “number of opens”. But at the top of his list of things not to do when communicating via email is the cardinal commandment: Don’t be a spammer.

There are two definitions of spam. The first is the legal one, which varies from country to country. Vietnam metes out fines of up to $5,000 for spammers. Sin-gapore has also aggressively outlawed spam, joining many Western countries that have already jailed people who as-sault inboxes without the owner’s per-mission. But Thailand and Cambodia do not regulate unsolicited email. That makes it relatively easy for spammers to blast away with investment opportuni-ties, natural health newsletters and, yes, even the promise of a larger penis, to a global audience of strangers – without legal repercussions.

Kadish warns that Thailand’s image as a spammer’s paradise actually hurts busi-nesses here. “If your emails are coming from a country known for its loose spamming regulations, servers are much more prone to getting blacklisted.”

It takes time and money to get a server ‘white-listed’ or back in the good books of the major internet service providers (ISPs) that have decided to block your outgoing traffic.

Legal or not, companies shouldn’t be sending email that even resembles spam. “The legal definition of spam doesn’t mat-ter,” Kadish explains. “You have to play so much more conservatively than that. If you live your life by ‘I’m not going to send stuff the recipient doesn’t want,’ then you’ll never find yourself in a situation where you’ve broken a law.

one thing, it can easily be tracked, allowing you to monitor the user’s every click and giving the company precious insight into how their information is used.

“The beautiful thing about email marketing is that every time you do an (email) blast, you get results back – you know how many people opened it, what time they opened it, you can see those little things.”

From a financial point of view, email is also the most cost-effective solution for drumming up business.

For every dollar a business spent on email marketing in 2009, it returned an average of $43.62 in sales, according to a study by the Direct Marketing

THAILAND ECONOMY

Mixed messagesSpam hasn’t killed internet marketing, only made it more complicated

TOP 10 EMAIL MARKETING TIPS

1. DON’T BE A SPAMMER 2. Show R-E-S-P-E-C-T 3. Content is king 4. Timing is queen 5. Make a great first impression 6. Always reward for reading 7. Test, test, test 8. Track, track, track 9. ABC (Always be collecting) 10. Follow ALL best technical practices

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FEBRUARY 2010 29

30 SEA GLOBE

Can it: celebrated first by Monty Python and now by the internet

“Everybody says, ‘Email – that’s easy, I do it every day.’” explains Kadish. “But when you’re sending tons of email, there’s a whole different set of rules you have to play by.

“ISPs like Yahoo and Hotmail, they say, ‘If you’re going to be giving me a million messages an hour, you’ve got to follow certain rules.’ It’s like deliveries at restau-rants. If you’re going to be bringing in raw meat, you can’t walk it through the front door where people are eating. You’ve got to bring it through the back door.”

ISPs lay down complex rules for sending mail in bulk, even restricting the time and quantity sent. Your business, Kadish con-tends, needs to set up systems for reporting abuse and collecting feedback. If, for exam-ple, Yahoo determines that you may have breached its bulk email policy, it needs to be able to contact you.

Typically, that’s done through a system called ‘reverse DNS (Domain Name Sys-tem).’ Essentially, it works like this:

When you type a website’s name into a browser window, DNS takes those letters and converts them to numbers, called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Reverse DNS takes that numbered IP address and then converts it back to a domain name.

With that domain, you can easily find the name of the owner. So if the rules for send-ing bulk email are broken, an ISP can con-tact the website owner and attempt to clear up the situation.

Establishing relationships with ISPs, however, is no simple business.

“You have to white-list yourself, add yourself to feedback loops, get your reverse DNS and your abuse reporting all set up correctly,” Kadish notes. “Or else when you start doing your mail, ISPs won’t have a way to contact you and assume the worst.”

Confused? You’re not alone. While most businesses have no trouble sending out a heap of emails, very few have the know-how to undo the damages if that mail is perceived as spam.

“The minute you start doing things and not following those rules, not only are you diminishing that return on investment, you’re ruining your brand for later capital-isation,” Kadish warns. “When there’s so many brands to compete with, you’ve got to make sure your brand stays clean.”

If not, you may find yourself racing to re-pair your company’s tattered credibility. And while doing so, you just might hear a distant thunder – the collective clatter of thousands of delete keys, all clicking at once.

Association, a trade group representing 3,400 companies worldwide.

In comparison, search engine optimisa-tion, or SEO – the practice of increasing a site’s traffic volume so the likes of Google rank it highly – returned $21.85 for every dollar spent.

The trick is getting those emails to a relevant audience.

“Just because your cousin sent an email with 300 people in the ‘To’ field, doesn’t mean you can copy those 300 people and add them to your list,” says Kadish.

Email addresses are painstakingly culti-vated over time, as people visit a website and sign up for more information. The opt-in is critical, as it represents an oppor-tunity for business to interact further with a potential customer.

“People tend to think of buying lists as so cheap – ‘I can reach so many people so eas-

ily’ – and yeah, you can just as easily ruin your brand,” he adds.

Indeed, nothing stinks of spam more than a mismatch between a company’s offerings and the recipient’s needs.

“E-letters can play an important part in a brand’s relationship with the market, but that contribution has to fit into the context of an overall market strategy,” explains Si-mon Nash, general manager of the Thailand branch of global brand specialists gH de-sign. “Unless it is well planned out in terms of to whom it is being sent, why it is being sent out, and what it will say – it is probably going to be hit quickly with the delete but-ton and the brand has the [positivity] metre leaning the wrong way.”

Once your company gathers a list of willing recipients, and sends out email in serious quantities, the intricacies of email suddenly reveal themselves.

THAILAND ECONOMY

‘When you’re sending tons of email, there’s a whole different set of

rules to play by’Jonah Kadish, DeeMoc