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www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/customer_relations/article.php/3398731
By Christopher Saunders August 23, 2004 E-mail marketing's always been a cheap and effective way to promote your products and boost your brand among consumers. Now Lyris Technologies' popular ListManager software introduces a slew of new features designed to make your e-mail marketing still more successful. The new edition of ListManager, version 8.0, adds new features that help your online mailings to be more valuable chiefly by ensuring that marketers don't alienate their e-mail recipients. For instance, one key addition centers around frequency limits. The offline direct marketing world has long known that it's good idea to ensure that customers and prospects aren't overwhelmed with too many communications from you, since doing so can reduce burnout (keeping conversions high) and prevent you from being labeled a spammer. "What seems appropriate enough forward is some way to throttle back and restrain marketers from going beyond what they intended," said Steve Brown, director of operations at Lyris. "The climate is not very friendly toward marketers who are sending tens or hundreds of thousands of messages with abandon ... so ListManager 8 contains several features to that end." Version 8 of ListManager enables site marketers to place limitations on the number of times a list or an individual list member can be sent an e-mail. For instance, Brown said, "You can remove e-mail addresses from a particular mailing that have received more than three mailings in the last month.' Or [for discussion lists] if you have very active administrators, you might want to make sure people don't receive more than one message a week." "We would expect marketers to use this to use make sure if they have multiple campaigns going on at once that they don't send too much mail," he added. As part of the address-blocking features, ListManager 8 also introduces a new way for sites that purchase e-mail lists from third parties to ensure that recipients don't receive e-mail that they don't want. "Our products always allowed an admin to ban an e-mail address permanently [from their own lists] if someone writes in and says 'Don't ever send me ever again,'" Brown said. "But ... people who rent lists from third parties may be maintaining separate suppression lists, so we enabled ListManager 8 to work with that. You can suppress against a third-party list at the mailing level, and you can add [a third-party] suppression list to the permanent ban list." That enhancement also helps stay compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 by ensuring that opted-out addresses aren't sent e-mail accidentally. Anti-spam additions Sender Policy Framework, or SPF, is a protocol used by servers to verify that the e-mail they receive is from a legitimate sender -- one who isn't faking their identity. That aims to thwart spammers, who often forge "From" headers to disguise the nature of their mailings. ListManager 8.0 adds SPF support by enabling administrators to configure the software to reject any e-mail that it's sent that detects to be forged. That means that customers on your e-mail list won't receive unwanted e-mail through your server sent by spammers who are attempting to conceal their identities. "Sender ID is becoming more and more of a reality," Brown said. "Big players getting behind it. From the mail-sending end, it's really up to the systems administration at each server site to make sure they're sending out their SPF records. That's not something Lyris has control over. But we also realized our product could benefit if it read SPF records of incoming e-mail." Lyris, which offers a hosted service in addition to ListManager, also publishes SPF records for e-mail sent by its 1,200 list hosting clients. RSS and other enhancements RSS, which has grown in renown with the explosion in blogging, is a publishing format that enables sites to distribute content (everything ranging from blog updates to special offers or new products announcements) without sending it to recipients' spam-cluttered e-mail inboxes. That could win you points with RSS-savvy customers, who appreciate the numerous benefits of information delivered using the format. The new edition of ListManager adds a number of enhancements designed to avoid alienating your lists' recipients, but it also offers a couple of user interface improvements to make your work easier. For one thing, the software offers a new overview screen that provides a summary of vital statistics from recent mailings -- such as delivery rates, subscribe and unsubscribe rates, and click-through, clickstream and conversion results. Christopher Saunders is managing editor of eCommerce-Guide.com.
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