E-Mail Marketing - Duplicate E-mail Addresses And Other Problems

DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESSES AND OTHER PROBLEMS

When the use of e-mail for direct marketing began in 1994, the e-mail industry adopted the standard practice of having list owners retain possession of their customers' e-mail addresses. Marketers who rented the lists had to rely on the list owners to send out their messages. When marketers rented e-mail lists from multiple vendors, there was a likelihood of duplication, with some customers receiving duplicate e-mails. In addition, marketers could not eliminate existing customers from the mailings. Finally, there was no consistency in message format among the different list owners, so marketers had difficulty comparing the results from different lists.

As of 2001, list owners continued to refuse to release e-mail lists to mailers, and problems with duplicate mailings continued. Proposed solutions include shipping the e-mail files to a trusted third-party service bureau so that duplications and existing customers can be removed from the files to be mailed. Other solutions are being developed to merge and purge e-mail files in order to eliminate duplicates from multiple lists and suppress mailings to a marketer's existing customers.

Another problem plaguing e-mail marketers is the lack of a change-of-address system similar to the one in place for regular mail. According to DM News, only nine to 20 percent of consumers who change their e-mail addresses notify marketers and update their e-mail subscriptions to online newsletters, Web sites, and discussion lists. An early 2001 study conducted by NFO Research estimated that the annual rate of e-mail address changes was about 32 percent. Some 41 percent of consumers changed their e-mail addresses at least once during the past two years. To address this problem, Return Path Inc. was established in 1999 to provide an e-mail change-of-address service that optimized e-mail marketing lists and gave consumers an easy way to notify all of their personal, business, and commercial contacts of their new e-mail address.