Managers Worry about Being Spammers Themselves, According to Survey  (email this article)

INDIANAPOLIS – (June 15, 2004) – Managers, many who presumably have gone to great lengths to protect themselves from receiving Spam email, now find themselves worrying that they too may be a source of unsolicited commercial email, according to a survey conducted by email solution provider ExactTarget, which is used by more than 2,000 organizations worldwide. The survey also shows that these same managers are grappling with the issues of maintaining both brand control and message consistency throughout all outbound emails.

For most organizations, email has become the communications medium of choice for marketing efforts, customer service follow up, order confirmations and one-off communications between internal employees and customers. “Email is so accessible and easy to use that it’s become nearly impossible to control every message leaving from every computer,” says Chris Baggott, co-founder of ExactTarget. “As a result, enterprises are having difficulty managing email at the very time when governed, compliant systems and processes are needed most.”

In the survey, when respondents were asked how concerned they are that an unsubscribed person will receive email from their enterprise again, 78 percent of survey respondents reported feeling somewhat to very concerned. In validation of their concern, 35 percent reported that subscribers had received emails during the past year despite opting out of lists. Likewise, 45 percent said they were somewhat to very concerned that an employee will inadvertently send an unapproved email. In fact, 9 percent reported that this actually occurred in their organization within the last year.

To help aid enterprise managers deal head-on with these important issues, ExactTarget will host two complementary webinars titled Organizational Governance & Compliance: Effective Control Over Outbound Email at the Enterprise Level. These webinars will highlight the specific challenges of email governance and compliance and offer prescriptive approaches that can help reduce financial risk, brand erosion and potential legal exposure. The webinars will be held June 17th and July 7th, from 2-3 p.m. EST.

The webinars will cover the four primary challenges that email presents to enterprises:
1. Maintaining Brand Integrity: The most valuable asset any enterprise has is its brand. Nothing is more frustrating or potentially damaging to a company than to perfect the brand at the corporate level only to have it misrepresented or damaged at the point of one-to-one customer communications. Of those responding in the survey, 91 percent said that maintaining consistent branding in email is important or very important and 90 percent said that maintaining a consistent message in email is important or very important.

2. Managing Subscriber Data Across the Enterprise: Distributed channels within an enterprise often maintain their own customer/subscriber information. Enterprise managers are faced with the task of consolidating independent pieces of customer data, merging this data into a customer profile, and then creating a single exhaustive list based on these profiles. Simply identifying where this customer information resides can be difficult. In the survey, 71 percent of respondents said they have at least some difficulty in managing their global unsubscribe list.

3. Remaining Legally Compliant: A 2003 FTC study showed that only 2 percent of email was compliant with state anti-spam laws, and early studies of the CAN-SPAM Act show single digit compliance rates with the new federal laws. Enterprises must become familiar with the laws and remain fully compliant.

4. Avoid Spam Filtering: ISPs are blocking nearly 90 percent of email because they believe it to be spam. Much of this email comes from organizations that have not received proper education regarding filtering, and therefore send legitimate emails that are erroneously labeled spam. This “false positive” results in 20 percent of legitimate commercial email failing to reach its intended audience. To avoid this, enterprise managers must become familiar with the criteria which ISPs use to identify and block email that is believed to be spam.

About ExactTarget
ExactTarget delivers on-demand email solutions for permission-based email marketing. Home Depot, CareerBuilder, General Mills, Scotts, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and more than 2,000 organizations worldwide rely on ExactTarget email solutions to strengthen their customer relationships and to control email throughout the enterprise. ExactTarget offers solutions that meet the needs of all industry verticals and all size organizations, including SMB, corporate divisions, not-for-profits, large retail/direct marketers, agencies and enterprises. Privately owned and headquartered in Indianapolis, the company has 25 U.S. sales offices. To learn more, go to www.exacttarget.com.