As marketers and sales people, we all know that companies now employ increasingly sophisticated means to avoid receiving “Spam”. And, since spam has come to dominate email on the Internet, it’s no wonder.

Internet historians believe that the first spam email was sent on May 1st, 1978, by a DEC marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States. The general reaction was one of annoyance, and it hasn’t abated since. In 2001, only 5% of email on the Net was spam. By 2003 this figure had risen to 50%. Then, by 2004 it was 70%. By 2007, almost 90% of business email was characterized as “Spam”.

One line of defense is to buy your email marketing lists from providers who understand the nuances of spam blocking. One low-tech way that companies use to dodge your email is to frequently alter and/or use multiple syntaxes in email address construction. For example, Jamie.Bloomquist@thelistinc.com is an email syntax that suggests that everyone at The List Inc. has an email address consisting of Firstname.Lastname@thelistinc.com.

But that’s not always – or even often – the case. A study of several thousand major brands in The List Online database, determines that major brands frequently change, mix and multiply the syntaxes of their employee email address, in an effort to stay a few steps ahead of spammers.

For example, in a study by The List Online, it was determined that Proctor & Gamble uses 5 distinctly different email syntaxes. Coca Cola currently uses 7 different formats. Microsoft Corporation also uses 7 different syntaxes. General Motors uses three.  These syntaxes can also vary based on job functionality; for example brand managers will differ from marketing directors who will differ with CMO’s.

What does this mean to you? First, it means that deliverable email is getting increasingly difficult to count on as a marketing vehicle. CAN-SPAM Compliance has limited marketers’ options dramatically. Add to that the increasing proclivity for companies to utilize multiple syntaxes and formats and it means that accuracy in sourcing your email lists is essential.

With B2B opt-in email address lists going for $1 per record to as high as $7 per record, depending on the broker, it’s essential that you ask your list broker about multiple syntaxes and address construction formats. If they don’t know, chances are the email list is both filled with junk addresses and violates CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. You don’t want to spend that kind of money on a list that is both in violation of the Law, and, grossly inaccurate. Make sure you know how often your broker verifies email address lists both for syntax and CAN SPAM.

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It started off inocently enough.  But Beth Brody from BrodyPR made a simple mistake.  She e-mailed the same pitch to a big list of contacts and included that contact list in the CC field which ignited a series of “Reply All” responses that, in tun, went to the same distribution list.

Over and over again.

It’s sort of like the media relations equivalent of being at a rock concert and the audience gets more caught up in keeping that damn beachball bouncing around in the crowd than they do in what’s going on onstage.  Then, the next thing you know, the grumpy musical purists start yelling for people to sit down and the kids start complaining that nobody ever lets them have any fun anymore …

Lucky for me (I guess) that I was at a client meeting while all this was going on and I just walked in on the carnage afterward.  Today there’s been a virtual pile-up on the social news media highway – and I’m viewing it as a first responder.

Maybe “pile up” isn’t nearly as accurate as “pile on” when you see how other PR professionals took advantage of Beth Brody’s lapse in judgement to cast dispersions, fluff up their own reputation and build blog traffic.

Here’s what looks to have happened:

• Beth Brody sent out her pitch in the morning (7:45 am CDT).
• Approximately 17 minutes later, Donna Maria Coles Johnson of Monroe, NC “Replied All” in response and the die was cast.  Everyone on the first distribution of the release received Donna Maries response.
• A half hour later, Shel Isreal replied back to Donna Maria – again using the “Reply All” function.
• Within minutes, folks were starting to “Reply All” to let everyone know not to use “Reply All” to reply.
• People started getting a little snarky shortly after that and the sniping started.
• Ken Wheaton, of AdAge, weighed in at 11:19 am CDT and threatened to expose those perpetuating the email chain reaction.  Although Ken didn’t follow through with his threat (entirely), he did write about it on the AdAge web site.
• Not to be outdone by AdAge, John Capone of MediaPost offerred up a stoning at an OMMA conference to offending PR’s.
• By a little before lunch, things went from snarky to mean-spirited with people insisting they be taken “off this fucking list” and moving to have BrodyPR put on a blacklist of PR firms who spam.

By the time the email “spamalanche” was over, things were just starting to heat up on Twitter.

• In three hours, there were nearly 100 tweets about BrodyPR and the entire kerfuffle.
• A few PR’s dominated the online tar-and-feathering; most notably serial-tweeter Chris Abraham (@chrisabraham) with nearly 20 tweets on the subject.
• Others were tweeting and blogging about the event and there were those (including yours truly) who were blogging about the blogs and the tweets about the event.

So, what does all this tell us? 

First off, some people must have too much time on their hands. Honestly, the entire number of additional emails in my Inbox due to Beth Brody’s foul up and everyone else’s over-reaction to it totalled about 30 emails.  If I had been really put out by the entire matter, I could have set up a rule in outlook to delete anything with the subject header and I never would have seen any more emails past the first four or five.  (Read your Outlook owner’s manual, people!)

The second lesson is that the irony of fouling up an email pitch for a book on using social media for small business is more likely to hurt Beth and her client than all the pundit arm waving and chest beating.  Shel Isreal responding with a “Reply All” email to Donna Maria’s request is either blatant astroturfing or a huge blow to Shel’s credibility as an expert.  Neither is a good thing to have happen to your PR client.

Although my email Inbox is apparently the exception rather than the rule, ADOTAS reports that more than 20 percent of commercial, permissioned emails go undelivered – and most marketers don’t even realize it.

Yikes.  That’s bound to impact the response rate, isn’t it?

Read the whole story here.

Aaron Smith, writing for MediaPosts’s Email Insider, provided an interesting sumary of the most common misconceptions about email marketing.  Aaron is a founder and principal at Smith-Harmon, a design agency focused on email marketing.  (Visit the Smith-Harmon site.)

In these tough economic times, more and more businesses are turning to low-cost marketing tactics that offer potentially high rewards – tactics like email marketing.

The problem, as Aaron points out, is that this potential for a high return on the marketing investment can lead executives to make incorrect assumptions and uninformed business decisions that can have significant (and negative) consequences over time.

Email marketing isn’t exactly like other forms of marketing and common practices for medias like newspaper or television (like increasing impressions by increasing frequency) can backfire.  Aaron outlines the three most common mistakes below:

1. You can increase revenue by increasing frequency with little or no negative consequences. This may be the biggest myth of all. While increasing the number of mailings may result in short-term revenue gains, many program managers are finding out the hard way that sustained increases in frequency result in a number of negative consequences, including:

-          Lower long-term revenue as recipients become less engaged

-          Higher cost of list maintenance and subscriber acquisition as unsubs increase

-          Deliverablity issues as a result of higher spam complaints

-          And worst of all, damage to brand equity

In “View from the Inbox 2008,” a report jointly produced by Merkle and Harris Interactive, 32% of consumers said they stopped doing business with at least one company as a result of poor email practices.

2. Good email creative isn’t different from direct mail or banner ads. While there are certain universal marketing tactics that can be applied equally to email, print and television channels,  consumers engage with email in very specific and measurable ways. It’s possible that taking a print flyer and sending it out as an image-heavy email message may be better than not sending a message at all, but truly effective email creative takes into account factors that make the channel unique. Understanding the limitations of email and the inbox environment like preview panes, disabled images and the nuances of various email readers such as Outlook 2007, is critical to successful messaging.

3. It only takes an hour to prepare and send an email campaign – AKA “how hard can it be?” Yes, and the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are real. From a marketing perspective, one of the most attractive things about the email channel is the ability to react quickly to shifting marketing goals and turn around campaigns in a short amount of time. And while I have seen truly miraculous turnaround times, effective email campaigns still require strategic and tactical planning, copywriting, designing and coding. Writing effective copy, designing for the inbox environment and coding with an understanding of the many email readers out there are all tasks requiring a high degree of skill and specialized knowledge that only comes with experience. Theoretically you can prep and send a message to your subscribers in under an hour, but odds are it won’t be worth the cost of sending the mailing.

In summary, it’s important to take some time to learn as much as you can about email marketing best practices and consumer preferences (they continue to change) in order to be a “good” client and make smart decisions.  The resulting customer activity and consumer loyalty to your brand could pay dividends for years to come.