E-mail marketing provider Bigfoot Interactive announced on Wednesday it added features to help marketers avoid having their messages tagged as spam to its Direct Response E-mail Application Manager (DREAM) technology platform.
The DREAM platform will now have list hygiene and content scoring components built in, instead of as add-on products. Bigoot will also offer a delivery-monitoring system as a companion service, known as DREAMonitor.
“As the harmful rise in unsolicited e-mail continues, the ongoing evolution and development of anti-spam efforts is a welcomed market reality that also requires advanced expertise,” said Al DiGuido, Bigfoot’s chief executive.
E-mail marketers have found themselves swept up in the hysteria of the spam problem. The top ISPs have identified spam as their biggest customer complaint, with each implementing anti-spam measures. AOL, for example, said it blocks a billion unwanted commercial bulk e-mails each day, while customers send 4 million spam reports daily.
Recently, AOL’s general counsel said that the spam problem might force the company to take more aggressive actions, including instituting a mechanism that would benchmark the performance of e-mail marketing companies against each other to develop baseline standards.
AOL is not alone. Both MSN and Yahoo! have also taken aggressive steps to combat unwanted e-mail. Yahoo! has even taken to encouraging e-mail users to report spam through a contest running on its site.
The strong stands have inevitably led to false-positives, when legitimate e-mail marketing messages are tagged as spam. In many cases, senders can avoid this by eschewing spam-like wording or delivery techniques
Bigfoot Interactive, like other e-mail marketers, offers a variety of services to guard against this. With list hygiene, e-mail marketers can strip their mailing lists of invalid addresses by comparing their lists to a master list of problem addresses Bigfoot Interactive maintains. Bigfoot Interactive also offers campaign consulting, known as content scoring, which analyzes marketing messages for wording and creative that might give the impression the e-mail is spam.
DREAMonitor allows e-mail marketers to gauge their delivery rates for the major e-mail providers, including AOL, MSN, Hotmail and Yahoo!. Clients are automatically alerted to potential delivery problems.
