Spam epidemic threatens email marketing
Article Date: Jun 22 2007Of the 4.5 billion messages Hotmail processes every day, 90 per cent are classified as spam. Ensuring that legitimate marketing emails reach customers’ inboxes is getting harder, says John Paterson, chief executive of customer relations management (CRM) hosting service Really Simple Systems.
But Paterson argues that this is no reason to give up on email direct marketing. 'While the problem of getting your email delivered is increasing, people’s receptiveness to the emails they want is growing,’ he tells GrowthBusiness.co.uk. ‘The industry of email direct marketing is also becoming increasingly effective through personalisation and other techniques.’
According to Paterson, most spam filters work on a scoring system. If the score reaches a certain threshold then the email is let through but prefaced with the word "Spam". Hit a higher score and the email is filed in the recipient's junk folder, or simply deleted.
The filtering is more stringent for personal webmail than in corporate email systems, Paterson reckons, leading to particularly acute problems for those targeting individual consumers as opposed to companies.
‘Generally speaking, webmail filters err on the side of “if in doubt, don’t let it through,”’ he adds. ‘Corporate filters tend to be biased in the other direction.’
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