The Federal Trade Commission has approved four new rule provisions under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM or the Act). The provisions are intended to clarify the Act’s requirements. The provisions and the Commission’s Statement of Basis and Purpose (SBP) will be published in the Federal Register shortly.

The new rule provisions address four topics: (1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender; (2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements; (3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and (4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

In addition, the SBP accompanying the final rule also addresses a number of topics that are not the subject of any new rule provisions. These include: CAN-SPAM’s definition of “transactional or relationship message”; the Commission’s decision not to alter the length of time a “sender” of commercial e-mail has to honor an opt-out request; the Commission’s determination not to designate additional “aggravated violations” under the Act; and the Commission’s views on how CAN-SPAM applies to forward-to-a-“friend” e-mail marketing campaigns, in which someone either receives a commercial e-mail message and forwards the e-mail to another person, or uses a Web-based mechanism to forward a link to or copy of a Web page to another person. The SBP explains that, as a general matter, if the seller offers something of value in exchange for forwarding a commercial message, the seller must comply with the Act’s requirements, such as honoring opt-out requests.

The new rule provisions and SBP are a follow-up to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on these and other CAN-SPAM topics that the Commission published on May 12, 2005 and March 11, 2004, respectively. The Commission received 152 comments and suggestions on the NPRM and 13,517 comments and suggestions on the ANPR from representatives of a broad spectrum of the online commerce industry, trade associations, individual consumers, and consumer and privacy advocates. The new rule provisions and SBP are based on these comments and suggestions as well as the Commission’s law enforcement experience.

The Commission vote to approve the Federal Register Notice was 4-0.

1. Make your sign-up form easy to find. Remember that nearly every page on your site has the potential to be a landing page, particularly in the case of visitors arriving from search engines.

2. Provide a convincing incentive for subscribers to sign up. Provide good quality content for email subscribers.

3. Don't ask for too much information. It's tempting to ask for more information that might teach you slightly more about your subscribers, but the more information you ask for, the more hesitant many people will be to give up private information and to invest time into filling out your form. Keep it simple. Ask for what you need to email your subscribers with your goals for personalization and segmentation in mind.

4. Use a thank-you page that does its job. The job of a good thank-you page, usually, is to transition subscribers from a Website experience to an inbox experience. Set expectations with subscribers about what they should expect to receive, including what your emails will look like in their inbox, and what they should do with it. This is especially important when using a confirmed opt-in process.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

I’m disappointed that the man named Crusader of the Year by Time Magazine has fallen prey to that affliction of the ego that has body slammed countless numbers of politicians, corporate leaders, preachers and celebrities over the years.

The lust of power makes the man invincible in his own mind and allows him to rationalize lines that the rest of us do not cross. So it’s time for Client 9 to resign and let the NY State legislature get back to being the least productive and most dysfunctional state legislature in the country.

Now that HD-DVD has gone the way of BetaMax, the American public no longer has to be the guinea pig for the Electronics and Media companies that can’t find a way to collaborate. If only the ginormous retailer, WalMart, took a stand on day 1 of these two non-compatible formats and stocked only one of them, how many people would not be stuck with an HD-DVDsaurus waiting to add to our landfills?

If you haven’t yet put your HD-DVD player up for sale on Ebay, don’t bother. Their value just plunged into the bitter pit of obsolete technology on which one million early adopters gambled wrongly.

How will email marketing survive a recession? I think it’s fair to say that no industry is immune to a recession, but email certainly remains a lower cost alternative to other online marketing avenues.

Will advertisers shift more of their compressed budgets to email? It’s proven, reliable and has a predictable ROI. My crystal ball is a little cloudy, but I predict that the few winners to emerge on the other side will be the ones who can anticipate and adapt as the market evolves.

The affiliate Summit is right around the corner and I am trying to set up like 50 appointments.  Any other
city and its easy, in Vegas I keep hearing; 'well I'll be at the $5 black jack table at the Wynn,' 'meet me
at the club at Bellagio,'or the best yet 'I'm not working when I'm in Vegas, my boss will be drunk and
gambling, I'm playing.'

I LOVE Las Vegas like the next person but we still need to get business done so for all of you slackers
out there - PUT ME IN YOUR SCHEDULE!  This is a business trip so business needs to get done.  I have
10 appointments set already and need about 15 more to feel productive.  Please understand I am traveling for
BUSINESS.....Don't forget to add my name to your party list though after all it is Vegas Baby Vegas
 

Answer: Most Internet service providers have systems in place to scan incoming messages individually for viruses and spam. The messages are then checked against black lists and evaluated with other attributes. Reputation is a newer criterion that ISPs are using to evaluate mail. A sender’s reputation is determined when ISPs request the sender’s reputation score from a central, third-party reputation database.
While reputation management can decrease the amount of spam received by ISPs, it also means that senders must be able to implement a variety of specific sending rules to comply with each ISP’s requirements and be able to facilitate header markups to incorporate third-party accreditation solutions.

Some e-mail solutions readily accept new standards to adapt easily to changing ISP sending environments. Less flexible solutions make it more difficult to comply with ISP requirements, which can inadvertently damage a sender’s reputation if the company is using poor or unchecked sending practices.

Complying with individual ISP “throttling” requirements—the speed and volume at which an ISP will accept your e-mail—is a key factor in maintaining a good reputation. As a marketer, you should know if your e-mail platform (either in-house or through an e-mail service provider) allows control over settings such as total outbound connections, total message volume and volume ramping, and gives senders a way to match their sending practices to each ISP’s requirements, which change on a regular basis.

Senders should also be aware that a vast database of reputation data based on the global sending practices of thousands of companies was collected recently and published by anti-spam and accreditation vendors. This report provides ISPs with another way to filter e-mail by producing a “gray list” of senders. ISPs will make judgment calls based on the sending history published on this report to determine whether to send or block e-mail from unknown gray-listed senders.

Establishing a good reputation with ISPs is vital to deliverability. To protect your company’s reputation, consider doing the following:

1. Use throttling to insure that you are not over burdening ISPs by sending too many messages too fast. If you use an ESP, make sure they provide you with the reporting to understand exactly how each ISP treats your mail.

2. Contract with a third-party accreditation service that certifies sender policies and practices and makes those certified lists available to the ISPs.

3. Depending on the type or volume of mail you are sending, establishing an in-house ISP relations team can help ensure that your mailing practices and reporting are contributing to maintaining a good reputation and relationship with each ISP.

As I’m counting down with the barely audible Dick Clark I begin to think about 2008 and what is in store for the internet world.  10..9.. I'm sure after our champaigne haze wears off we will be back in the office working hard.  8..7.. I’m sure Google will buy 15 companies and increase their net worth by 100 billion dollars.  6..5.. I’m sure someone will call with the next greatest offer and it will turn out to be a zip submit for a free laptop.  4..3.. I’m sure I will be hunting down e-mailers, web publishers and other companies searching for new sources of traffic.  2..1.. I’m sure all of us will raise our beers at the Affiliate Summit and promise to do business with each other.  HAPPY NEW YEAR!!  I’m sure all of us look forward to a very profitable year, making good business and making money together.

If you are out there CALL ME

Debt offers, cash advance, payday loans, and zip submits are just tanking across the board. 

Imagine my surprise when my deployer IM's me and says we have over 400 clicks and 2 conversions AND they were test conversions.  What is going on, is there no new offers that can sustain a few weeks run?  What does this mean for the Christmas season?

Will we be able to find another screaming monkey ad that made us cry laughing AND lasted for 3 weeks or are we destined for RC Copter that has a life span of one email blast.

For many businesses, the period between October and early January makes or breaks the year’s bottom line. For online businesses, October is the right time to be placing your marketing and advertising dollars into email campaigns to be ready for this end of year frenzy. The need to book now will assure you a spot because most email marketing campaigns for November and December are booked to full capacity by the end of October. You definitely do not want to wait and be left out in the cold.

Search for the holiday season is tuff. Conventional wisdom states it takes about three to four months to achieve Top10 placements with an already established website. It can take even longer with new sites. The only real choice to get people to come to your site is via email marketing. This will bring a qualified customer right to your door. Seasonal advertising is almost always based on what are called saturation campaigns. Delivering your email campaign to the same people 2 or 3 times in a 4 week period is a must.

Savvy retailers are taking advantage of the ever expanding online audience afforded via search, web and email marketing which makes up the bulk of the manner in which most companies advertise on the web. Retailers who once had a localized marketplace are now competing with retailers from around the world for customers. Regardless of the fact that nobody's real-world store is starting to look a lot like Christmas yet, the race for strong search engine placements for Christmas and holiday related items began in June. So if you forget to jump on the bus, you’re probably out of luck.  Is your website positioned to achieve the visibility it needs to give you the Christmas season you want for your business? A good way to drive customers to your site is email marketing. You don’t have to wait to get your site listed in the Top 10 on a search engines front page. Email marketing is instant and direct way to bring customers directly to your website.

Time is of the essence. While it might be the most wonderful time of the year, Christmas and the holiday season, is just around the corner. This is an opportune time to begin the process of planning for success.

One of my favorite pastimes after hearing someone describe an event is to point out how a similar event played out on a Seinfeld episode. Most people can’t imagine how a show about nothing can be so prescient and applicable to our lives even eight years after it ended its network run.

So imagine this story arc of a lost Seinfeld episode: Kramer, the “hipster doofus,” who doesn’t have any visible means of support decides he’s going to make his fortune in email marketing. Using the computer he bought from Lloyd Braun, he starts to mail offers from some network he found on the internet. He gets all excited about his burgeoning commission report until they scrub him down to zero. Finally Kramer finds out that it’s Newman who’s behind the network that’s scrubbing him. Newman tells him it’s his bitterness at the post office that caused him to get into email. Newman reminds Kramer when you control the mail (in any form), you control information.

If you read my post on October 10th titled “The Mystery Behind Effective Email Marketing” I promised a follow up post on inbox delivery and here it is. Getting beyond the basics as I explained about making sure your system is setup “technically correct”, there is one major thing you need to do to get inbox delivery. Testing your creative prior to sending it out to your list will do just that. Go out to the major ISP’s and setup a free email account. Go to AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail and get yourself a free email account. Then upload this list into your system. Once you have your creative setup, score it using software like Spam Assassin. You want to try and get a score of as close to zero as possible. According to Spam Assassin, a score of 5.0 or less will be best. Over 5.0 will almost guarantee junk box delivery. Then send your newly created campaign to your test list. Login to each account and see where your creative went. If you find some of your test emails in your junk folder start fine tuning your ad until you get all delivered to the inbox. It is also important to make sure you are not using words like free, money, mortgage and so on in your creative or subject lines. This will greatly hinder your ability to deliver anything to the inbox.

I will also follow up with a post on the best practices for fine tuning your creative in the coming weeks.

I have 3 email accounts, a cell phone with texting ability, I'm plugged into IM and am logged on at least 13 hours a day. How come when I reach out to clients when there are issues to be solved I get radio silence? I would rather hear 'I have no answer for you today' or 'nothing yet' or 'still working on it' then not get a response. I know everyone is busy with work and life but we work in an industry that promotes constant contact. 

PLEASE at least acknowledge my text, IM, email, or phone call.  Even if it is a 'not yet' or 'have a nice weekend.'