Challenge and response email services claim to clear your email inbox from spam. Logically, all legitimate senders have to confirm that they indeed sent an email to you before the email goes to inbox. Usually, the sender has to do it once.

For email marketers, the system pose a problem. As more and more people use it, there is no choice but to manually respond and confirm to the challenge to have future mailings go through the recipients’ inboxes.

You need to either draw a hard line or invest the staff time to deal with challenge/response.

Fortunately, the concerns about spending a lot of time to respond to challenge/response confirmation emails never happen. In fact, the percentage of users using the system is fairly low. The usage is not increasing too.

According to Al Iverson, Exact Target’s Director Privacy and Deliverability:

“Your bank, your online travel site, that online store you recently bought DVDs from; very few of these very legitimate senders have the resources or capability to respond to C/R requests. You’ll find that most of them silently discard replies, as they come back mixed in with tons of spam, viruses, blowback, out of office replies, etc. I think after suddenly not receiving mail they want, users often rethink their use of C/R.

“Also, C/R can be a significant technical hurdle to overcome for novice e-mail users. Let’s say that some father e-mails his son and receives a C/R reply. Is he going to be tech-savvy enough to understand what’s going on? The experiences I’ve had don’t make me confident that this is the case.”

[Email Insider]

Journal of Interactive Advertising has published an academic paper studying email and postal direct marketing. If you enjoy reading scientific studies, this paper is a good read.

Here are the hypotheses drawn from this study:

• Consumers are likely to find spam more intrusive than direct mail.
• Ad intrusiveness caused by a) spam; b) postal direct mail negatively correlates with attitudes toward the advertising technique.
• The level of perceived loss of control by consumers will be greater for spam than direct mail.
• Perceived loss of control mediates the relationship between ad intrusiveness caused by spam and ad irritation.
• Consumers are likely to experience a higher level of advertising irritation from spam than direct mail communications.
• The degree of advertising irritation caused by a) spam; b) postal direct mail is negatively correlated with attitudes toward the advertising technique.

For methods of measurements, refer to the paper for details.

If you think email address typos are not something you should worry about, think again. The following study might at least surprise you. According to Email Experience Council earlier this year, the average major retailer loses $6.7 million per year due to email address typos.

Austin C. Bliss offers approaches to drive down the typo rate during email address submission on your Web site.

There are three reasons why email address typos are a tragedy for email marketers:

1. Lost revenues: Wasted marketing dollars and lost profits.
2. Poor customer experience: Prospect register and expect to receive newsletter or offer. If she doesn’t get what she wants, she blame you simply because the typo was unintentional.
3. Poor deliverability: The names and email addresses get into your database, but cause undeliverable messages in future mailings. It can jeopardize email reputation.

It is not hopeless though. Here are ways you could drive down the typo rate:

• Offer value: Offer value in exchange for email address. If it is something they really want to get, they will make sure they entered the correct email and double check.
• Use the address: Deliver the value to their email inboxes. Send the link to the download Web page to their email. Make it clear that you can’t deliver the promise if the address is incorrect.
• Box size: Give room for the input box. Average length of email addresses is 20.3 character.
• Confirm: Use a confirmation page to show what they entered and offer an opportunity for corrections.
• Use technology: Add technology that performs email address validation and correction.

Additionally, enforce double opt-in. Tell the registrants if they don’t receive a confirmation email and confirm it, they have to do so or register again.

The era of user generated content is here. No longer that consumers of a product or service are only the end-users without any control to talk back and impact brand.

The time has already came. People now put less trust on traditional marketing. They listen to what other consumers have to say about a product or service. When it comes to the Internet, finally people have a global medium to share their experience and communicate with others about this experience.

David Baker has an article that specifically address this issue and what it has to do for email marketers.

Most of us have several hundreds emails per week, maintaining separate email accounts simultaneously for both business and personal personas. While there are ways to get attention from recipients, there should be other ways to leverage email to closely involve consumers.

This, according to Procter & Gamble (P&G) CEO A.G. Lafley, is the third moment of truth. In the article written by Pete Blackshaw, he explains that the first moment of truth is what consumers see on the shelf, the second moment of truth is what happens when they try the product.

The third moment of truth is that powerful inflection point where the product experience catalyzes an emotion, curiosity, passion, or even anger to talk about the brand.

Marketers have to relinguish some control of the message. Not that they had true control in the first place, but they should be prepared to open up and listen to the consumer and be an enabler, writes Baker.

On one hand, marketers have to let go control of messages because leveraging consumers to bring the marketing messages can increase credibility and improve brand. On the other hand, opening up communications is a must because if we choose not to do so, consumers will start their own conversations. The messages spread nevertheless.

Open communications also encourage suggestions, product ideas and advertising concepts.

My thoughts: It is time to re-think the strategy of email marketing as part of the big picture. New consumer generated media is finally here.

The marketing channels are not perfect. None of them are standalone, a be-all and end-all of any marketing. As a marketer, we need to raise awareness and implement the right strategy where it fits.

How do you handle exactly different sources of email addresses? Do you have permission to send them email campaigns? In what circumstances do you have the permission to do so?

Permission actually means “the act of giving a formal authorization.”

The problem is, in practice, marketers often define permission pretty loosely at their own convenience.

This blog post tries to illustrate different situations most email marketers should encounter in email acquisition and how to comply with the anti-spam legislation.

Save your brand and practice safely.

1. Purchased third-party email addresses

In this situation, perhaps you have bought a bulk number of emails from a random guy. The issue is not only in the vendor where you purchased the list, but more importantly is the source of the names in the list.

If the vendor doesn’t have a clear information about where they obtain the names, or no direct contact or relationship with the names then it should raise a big warning sign.

This absolutely falls into the do not email category.

2. Casual business contact

You have been contacted by a web site visitor through a form for a question, or perhaps through other ways. The email owner didn’t explicitly grant permission for you to email them for anything commercial but the answer to the question.

This contact has no prior business relationship with you, so although s/he had gone through your site and read about your product or service, s/he is still a complete stranger to you.

Unless specifically filling in the subscription form, you don’t want to contact this prospect via email through mass mailing.

Some marketers choose to send a personal email to offer subscription. A recipient could simply choose to opt-in for future email communications. But, this is considered aggressive for others.

3. Prior business relationship

In this scenario, an email has prior business relationship with you, but not specifically confirm receiving future mailings from you.

Perhaps you obtain the email address through email append or online transaction, but you didn’t make an option to choose to opt-in or otherwise.

This email is quite safe, but expect a high unsubscription rate on the first few emails. The recipients may not want exactly what you have to offer and receive further communication with you.

To be on the safe side, send an email confirmation to the recipient to opt-in or opt-out immediately.

Also, if you were receiving the email addresses from old trade shows — more than six months for instance — make sure you reactivate permissions before sending email.

Although above scenarios are common, they are by no means complete. For the most complete list of scenarios I’ve seen so far, visit MailChimp. The table gives advices on working with MailChimp, but the scenarios apply to other “responsible” email service providers as well.