Are You An ‘Accidental Spammer?’

You and your web hosting provider believe in stellar customer service. To that end, you dedicate a significant amount of time and resources to exceed your customers’ expectations and keep them coming back to your ecommerce site. The very last thing you would ever do is intentionally annoy them by jamming their inboxes with meaningless junk. That alone keeps you on the high ground and off the blacklists, right? Not necessarily, according to reports presented at the recent Federal Trade Commission’ Spam Summit.

Many well-meaning etailers inadvertently wind up on blacklists despite their best efforts not to. Blacklists are lists that are compiled by industry watchdogs who track the originating servers for emails that “smell” like spam. The lists they ultimately compile may include web hosting providers, domains, internet service providers and email addresses. There are roughly 150 email blacklists that are constantly tracking recent offenders. Widely checked ones are Spamhaus, SpamCop and MAPS, each with look-up wizards and removal procedures. Yahoo, AOL and Comcast make their own decisions about who’ll they’ll block but they often use blacklists as a starting point.

“Almost every legitimate email marketer has gotten on a blacklist at one point or another,” said Jenny Mullen, founder and chair of the Email Executive Council in New York City. “It’s really kind of a crazy thing. You can get put on a blacklist for so many reasons, and some aren’t even within your control.”

Bob Frady, vice president of direct marking for LiveNation.com put it this way: “Whatever the rules are, we will gladly follow them. We just want to know what the rules truly are.” LiveNation was blacklisted for switching from in-house mailings to an email service provider where ISPs don’t immediately recognize the sender. It has also been blacklisted for cleaning up its database, a move that freed up 2 million old newsletter sign-ups. “Because we hadn’t communicated with these people in a long time we had spam complaints that went right to our ISP,” said Frady. “We were in danger of being shut down by our own ISP.”

According to a 2007 survey conducted by the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, 80 percent of recipients who click the “Report Spam” button do so while an email is still in preview mode. To help prevent this, you should top the page with a line that explains where recipients signed up or how you got their email address. Also provide an easy to use “unsubscribe” link.

Web hosting provider lists accidental spammer elements:

• Multiple uses of single words in quotes
• Words like “free” or “you’re the big winner”
• Words that are in all caps
• Sentences or words followed by multiple exclamation marks
• Subject lines that start with “buy, buying or test” are filtered by some anti-spam programs.

So what if, despite your best efforts, you wind up on one of the blacklists? Let your web hosting provider handle this one for you. Hosting companies are well-versed in the prevention of spam and they also understand how to work with anti-spam watchdogs to make sure your good intentions don’t get misinterpreted.

As customer value management takes center stage as one of the most important ways to differentiate you from your competitors, keeping your customers happy is more important than ever. Make sure that every single email sent from your site is useful, relevant and welcomed by its recipients.

For a long time, attempts to define spam were unsuccessful because nobody could agree on a description that would encompass all unwanted messages while excluding legitimate email. Miles Libbey, Yahoo’s top email operations executive, recently offered his company’s definition of spam. “Operationally, we at Yahoo define spam as anything our users don’t want in their mailbox.” That sums it up pretty well. If your customers find anything they “don’t want” in their mailboxes, work with your web hosting provider to make absolutely sure it doesn’t come from you.

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