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Here's the latest spin on why email marketers shouldn't have to worry about opt-ins.   According to the CEO of one marketing database company, this time, it's the economy.  Because, really, who can afford to follow best practices these days?  Desperate times, desperate measures, and all that.  Naturally, his company is there for you in these troubled times. Go ahead and read the whole thing, including (especially) the comments.  I'll wait right here...

This is not the first attempt to defend the practice of sending unsolicited email, and the ensuing debate was divided along predictable lines.  In case you didn't read all the comments, allow me to summarize the extremes of opinion:

"It's about time someone spoke out against the ESP's and their so-called best practices.  There's nothing wrong or illegal about sending unsolicted email, and the ESPs are just hiding behind opt-in because they're lazy."

"No, it's that people who send to purchased lists are irresponsible, unethical, immoral spammers.  And also stupid."

Me, I'd rather stay above the finger-pointing and name-calling, and discuss this issue in the universal language all marketers can understand: money.

All parties involved in sending an email marketing message have a profit motive.  The marketer's path to making money from email is clear...generate leads and convert them to sales.

The ESPs are in this business to make money, too.  Most of us get paid according to how much email we send.  So you might think our position would be, "the more e-mail the better," regardless of opt-in.  However, if the mail gets blocked by ISPs and can't be delivered, our customers grow unhappy and quit paying us.  So we establish minimum guidelines and promote "best practices" based on what we know works, in hopes that our clients listen, experience success, and keep paying us.

But what about the ISPs?  I'm talking about the companies that recieve most of the emails we send...AOL, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, telcos, cable companies...how do they make money off of email?

The ISP hopes that you'll use their email service, so that they can serve up ads within your inbox while you check messages.  They get paid not by the end users of their service, and not by marketers and ESPs who send email to them.  Their revenue comes from the advertiser.

What eats into their profit potential on email is the cost of the servers and bandwidth to handle all that incoming traffic.  As an ESP, our technology expenses are huge, but I can only imagine what it costs to run the infrastructure behind, say, Hotmail.  All I know is, it's expensive as hell, and we who send email to Hotmail are not the ones paying for it.

(Incidentally, this is why permission from recipients isn't, by itself, enough to get email delivered anymore.  Because permission is cheap.  Anyone can set up a free webmail account, and give their address to any mailing list, without it costing them a dime.  See, it's not just spam that chokes the ISPs servers, it's also the proliferation of bulk marketing emails that cost the end-user nothing to sign up for, but there's a cost to deliver them, forcing the ISPs to look at engagement metrics to determine which are the emails people actually want.)

This is why, whatever we think about the morality of opt-out marketing, it's only the ISP's opinions that matter.  Follow the money: ESPs ability to deliver email depends on their servers, paid for by their money, which comes from advertisers, who need the end-users to keep using the ISP's service, because it delivers the mail they want and filters out the mail they don't want.  Their subscribers + their equipment + their money = their rules.

If you want your mail delivered, you'll do what the ISPs want.  It's your ESP's business to know what they want, and help you conform.  And we know for certain that they don't want emails sent to people who didn't give you permission.

Chris Broshears | Product Development