The Brainsnack
Number 19

Winning the Inbox battle for relevancy.
Keeping your email marketing viable.

By Tom Barnes
May 30, 2003

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Prince was right. In 1999 we were partying.
I loved the smell of HTML in the morning. It smelled like victory.

Oh yeah, those were the days.

Sure, spam was an issue in '99, but who cared? Open rates were spectacular. You could see marketing happen in real time--all for 4 cents an email--heady times indeed.

Technology rocked in the good old days.

I wrote--along with many others--about the dangers of email and ways to kill your brand with this new tool. Most email marketers were like babies with loaded shotguns. That was OK with us. It made our stuff look and work even better. We were happy to help our competitors. After all, if people used email effectively we'd have a brand new channel to market in--one people would pay attention to; one that delivered measurable results.

Then, horribly, sometime in '01 or early '02, the promise of legitimate email marketing ended faster than a free pass at a porn site. Spam grew like kudzu in a hot Georgia summer. Address lists were passed around like a second grade love note.

People got offended quickly--even when you had a legitimate reason to solicit them. Now, according to the fine folks at Brightmail, 40% of the email we get is spam. Conversely, only about 20% of commercial broadcast is advertising. Do the math: your Inbox is twice as cluttered as your favorite radio station or TV show. Additionally, SilverPop says most HTML email can't even be read anyway.

ISPs and spam filters

But the evaporation of opportunity doesn't stop there. While email might cost you 3 or 4 cents a pop to send, (if you are paying more, you're getting ripped), it is costing ISPs millions in bandwidth expense. Don't think for a minute your friendly neighborhood ISP is going to eat that. At this very moment, heavy meetings are going on in almost every major ISP, working to figure out how they can gain legitimate control over every email that crosses their network.

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