Advertisers gathered to discuss the big issues surrounding email marketing, whether CAN-SPAM did anything, and if legitimate marketers can still rent lists.

BrightWave Marketing principal and regular iMedia columnist Simms Jenkins opened a roundtable discussion on email marketing by asking the gathered advertisers, publishers and vendors to identify the three biggest challenges facing email marketing today.

Within moments, the attendees had identified frequency, relevancy and deliverability as the key issues. This list posed no great surprise to anybody, but that did not make the issues any the less urgent.

Matthew Cohen of ClubMom.com indicated that the "amount of email that people have to go through on a daily basis, the frequency and sorting," poses a big problem. Additionally, Cohen worried about "the spam terminology; people interact with a brand, then get an email and call it spam" because they don't remember opting in for the communication.

On deliverability, Jenkins asked, "Is that something you monitor on an ongoing basis?"

Jack Goldberg of Windy City Advertising replied, "We monitor it. If we're doing an email campaign, we want to know if it got through."

Barbara Seward of Commission Junction added that her company is still trying to get a stable sense of "what is the average deliverability" so that they can backtrack with their own results.

Even if they're only speaking as consumers, Jenkins noted, "everybody can talk about frequency and relevance, so what's the perfect balance?"

Helen Har of Golf Magazine answered, "so long as it's something I asked for and it's important to me, frequency is irrelevant."

But opting in by itself can lead to grave customer dissatisfaction, as Barbara Seward realized when she sent a friend a cigar after his wife had a baby. Now, Seward gets ever-increasing spam from Cigar.com. "I get stuff from them all the time. It was a one-shot deal, and I regret it."

In addition, Seward suspects that Cigar.com sold her email address to a list that includes pornography, which, Jenkins noted, is a bad brand association.

"There's no benefit to the cigar company to email you because it drags down all of their metrics and response rates and gives them a really inconclusive read" on their marketing, Jenkins added. 

But in contrast to her negative experience with Cigar.com, Seward happily opted into email marketing from upscale handbag maker Bottega Veneta, and she welcomes their regular emails.

As the conversation moved on, Geary Interactive's Vanessa Reed asked, "Whatever happened to CAN-SPAM?"

Michael Soh of Carat Fusion noted that marketers collectively need, "a sense of best practices, and to follow them."

"Is the real issue still the people offshore?" Reed asked, noting that AOL and Yahoo! are consistently upgrading their technologies, but that the illegitimate, offshore spammers are also upgrading.

Jenkins asked if the advertisers at the table were still using list rentals, but everybody had stopped doing so. Acceleration's Howard Luks said that his company is "all opt-in" now.

"We stopped because of spammers and CAN-SPAM," Reed said. "Consumers freak out-- they think you're spamming them. They're paranoid about it."

ClubMom's Cohen added that at his company they, "Try to get a lot of data to personalize with," including a parent's and children's names" and they have a high 30 percent open rate as a result of this increase in relevancy.

Jack Goldberg then added that companies shouldn't rent lists, instead they should, "just buy the email address outright." 

Jenkins agreed. "Spend that money on paid search if you want real leads," then have an email address on the landing page, and then market to them. 

But even though offshore spammers aren't taking CAN-SPAM seriously, Jenkins noted, the recent fine levied by the FTC against Shutterfly strongly suggests that, "the CAN-SPAM law is for real now."

Jenkins then more generally asked the table if email is declining in responsiveness.

Commission Junction's Barbara Seward cited Mediapost as an example. "They have three different products. I stopped opening [the emails]. I can't keep up with them." 

The table then discussed the relative merits of single versus double opt-in. Goldberg unequivocally preferred single opt-in, citing experience from when he worked at an email vendor that moved to double opt-in. "Our conversion rates on double opt-in dropped to 20 percent," losing 80 percent of the people who responded to the initial opt-in.

Responding to Jenkins' question about possibly declining email responsiveness, Goldberg argued that with internal customer lists responsiveness is actually rising.

Matthew Cohen pointed out that there's a strong difference between an email being opened and something getting a click. "I tell clients, 'it's my job to get the open; it's your job to get the click…' it really depends on the content. Email needs to deliver value to the members."

Carat Fusion's Michael Loh added: "You need to qualify what kind of email efforts-- paid email versus CRM. I'm really on the first side, sponsored emails and paid media, and that side has yielded lower returns" than CRM.

As the time began to run out, the talk moved to email testing and what gets tested.

"Mostly subject lines," ClubMom's Cohen said. "Every time an email goes out, there are several tests."

"People don't do it enough," Windy City's Goldberg added. When a consumer joins an online club, that consumer should immediately receive an email. Email marketing should be integrated, immediate and personalized, and most clients aren't doing it. "We don't close the loop enough," Goldberg said. "We need to have a full context of how we're going to communicate with them."

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