Executives at Motorola were stunned last March when vitriolic e-mail messages began pouring in to the company's customer service department and even the CEO's office. Motorola's supposed crime? Sending out spam, according to angry customers who had received multiple unsolicited e-mail messages from a company that appeared to be a Motorola distributor or retailer offering a free Motorola pager.
"If this is the class of company that Motorola has as retailers, then I don't want anything further to do with any Motorola products or services!" said one customer, as quoted in a lawsuit posted on The SpamCon Foundation Web site.
The incident was all the more galling to Motorola officials because the company wasn't the source of the e-mail. Rather, a company identified in the e-mail as Paging Americaâ€"not affiliated with Motorolaâ€"was making the offer, said Allan Spiro, marketing manager at Motorola's wireless messaging division. And, Spiro said, the products named in the e-mail weren't even pagers the company made.
Rushing to prevent further damage, Motorola officials sent letters to Paging America demanding that it stop sending the e-mail and using Motorola's name. When that didn't work, Motorola in May filed a lawsuit against Paging America and others in U.S. District Court to recover damages and stop the e-mail.
As Motorola learned the hard way, it's easy even for an enterprise with all the right intentions to be labeled a spammer. E-mail marketing partners can and do mess up, and even unrelated companies can create the impression that your enterprise engages in spam. Even more commonly, marketers are increasingly flirting with being classified as spammers as they send ever-greater volumes of bulk e-mail in an attempt to market more effectively with online consumers. As a result, experts say, the burden has shifted to enterprises to make sure they manage their e-mail lists so only customers wanting e-mail messages get them, they avoid using e-mail lists from external providers, and they avoid inundating customers with too many or poorly targeted marketing pitches. And, to avoid being incorrectly labeled spammers, some enter prises are going even further, moving to double-opt-in e-mail marketing processes that satisfy even the most ardent anti-spam activists.
The dangers of bad e-mail marketing practices are real, with increasingly serious consequences. Eighteen states have laws in place regarding spam. Penalties can include fines for sending unsolicited e-mail messages that don't follow prescribed labeling provisions and for not having processes allowing recipients to be taken off e-mail lists, which is commonly called opting out. In addition, federal legislation is in the works, and dozens of countries in Europe have spam laws with even tougher provisions that in some cases ban commercial e-mail unless a recipient had requested to receive it, a process commonly called opting in.
At the same time, spam watchdog groups such as Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC, or MAPS, and major ISPs (Internet service providers) such as America Online and EarthLink are becoming more active in blocking domains of companies considered to be spammers. Most damaging of all, though, is the potential to alienate loyal customers who perceive poorly executed e-mail marketing as spam, experts say.
Just as the risks of being perceived as a spammer are growing, the potential rewards of aggressive e-mail marketing are shrinking. Recent research indicates e-mail is losing some of its commercial effectiveness. Consumers are buying fewer products and services advertised through e-mail, according to Forrester Research Inc., of Cambridge, Mass. Of the consumers surveyed by Forrester who had been online for less than a year, 18 percent said they often bought items advertised through e-mail last year, while only 6 percent report buying such items this year.
But marketers overall aren't planning to slow their push into e-mail. The volume of commercial e-mail in the United States is expected to triple to 424 billion messages by 2005. And spam is expected to consistently account for about 39 percent of those e-mail messages, according to forecasts by Jupiter Media Metrix.
