There are many different appeals here – better customer service, more contextual targetting but the tricky part remains – permission.  You can do it however – just might need to redesign your legal and acquisition tactics, and as the chat in email becomes more prevalent you might start harvesting the fruit of your out-of-the-box thinking early into the game.

Isn’t that a better way to eliminate those unworthy marketers, who do not offer their audience what they want, or blindly market to the same not interested people over an over clogging isps bandwidth and people’s mailboxes?

And email marketers – learn from search. You’ll be amazed at results derived via dynamic segmentation of your static lists. Some call it ’saved search selects’ other ’smart lists’ and building your targetting model around them is a skill worth investment.

There are at least dozen companies that understand how to feed these channels off of each other through analytics. In the search/display scene it’s Google (watch what comes out of Doubleclick’s acquisition), Yahoo (’smart ads’) and 24/7 (search retargetting) to name a few … and in the email field? Well, we might put that one to the quiz – look for acquisitions in the email marketing industry as a clue .. any guesses?

As more marketers become knowledgeable in the subject, you’re going to notice the emergence of winners – those who don’t just profile their users based on historical responses, but those with extensive publisher and advertisers relationships, know how and technology allowing for data intelligence sharing.  It helps to own your media, affiliate networks, display, search agencies … since applying behavioral targeting to email and other channels involves heavy use of unique user tracking, website analytics and other marketing intelligence.

Client came to us about a year ago not happy with deliveribility of their inhouse mailteam. (Obviously we cannot refuse when clients want to outsource it to us) Maybe a week into a relationship, still in getting-to-know the list stage we communicated about some of the practices of the past. Wasn’t a past for us – actually, a new gray-hat technique we’ve heard of but never tried. Basically, the client suggested some prior ESPs recommended using a seed list of internally created email addresses in order to minimize complaint levels and bounce rates.

Simple? Simply mail the seed list of a specific size as it relates to the mailing list; from the same server/ip in order to dillute the number of people complaining/bouncing from your regular mail file. You’ve got to know the ISP thresholds and have feedback loops set up of course.

Shady? We’d say so. We were very hesitant at first. You have to kid yourself thinking it’s a long term solution. However (to our surprise) it works in a short term and buys you time when you try to incorporate true best practices and quality assurance processes for a newly acquired client. Which leads to a final comment – has it really gotten to the point that clients have to look for email marketing dark magic?

Who are isps to decide whether people hitting that spam filters are not competition trying to destroy marketers email reputation and deliverability? Should they look at the CTR rate in addition to the bounce or spam button CTRs? (a la google’s quality score) Are spam traps and spam filters less than perfect? Have you missed emails from friends from abroad due to spam inbox filtering just because SPF record was not published for the sender’s highly reputable corporate address? …

Questions, no matter how trivial and amusing go on. Tricks might too so keep an eye out.

Maybe the times have changed and many ESPs won’t even take you on now without an autoresponder permission proof on every record. We believe in fundamentals however, and there is one constant in road to glory now and before – user experience counts. It always has. Just that in the past the complaints couldn’t be heard. They demonstrated themselves in falling opens, clickthrough and convertions – triggering marketers to mail out more volume and with higher frequency.

These days – the powerful ’spam button’ has forced those less knowledgeable marketers to sweat over complaint rates; but those of us who were always about mailing smarter by understanding the data feel rewarded. It feels good when comparing the numbers between RFM and behavioral/contextual/out-of-the-box targetting models you can’t avoid the one simple conclusion – quality wins over quantity.