Sharing means caring for e-mail marketers

Sharing means caring for e-mail marketers
By Rebecca Aronauer

E-mail marketers get a bad rap sometimes. The people responsible for sending participant-approved e-blasts are often confused with spammers, who illegally e-mail promises of quick money and easy fixes to unsuspecting mailboxes. But a new site is trying to be a one-stop shop for information on the best practices that can separate the legitimate marketers from the spammers.

Dot Email is a free community site for e-mail marketers. Created in January by Gold Lasso, an e-mail marketing firm based in Gaithersburg, Md., the site has message boards where users can vent and exchange ideas, as well as file-sharing applications that allow users to upload their own white papers and read the white papers of other users. The platform fits the Web 2.0 trend of user-generated content and sharing, believes Elie Ashery, the president of Gold Lasso. "I didn't see open source in the e-mail marketing community," Ashery says. "[But] a free flow of ideas is very healthy for the industry."

Although the site is new, it is becoming a community of sorts for e-mail marketers interested in developing a better image for the industry through best practices, says Steve Delgado, the Tucson, Ariz.-based marketing director of Arial Software, an e-mail marketing software company. "On this site, we're all trying to get to the same goal: to promote a permission-based e-mail platform," he says.

Everybody on Dot Email wants to participate in the best practices of e-mail marketing, but some of the members who are new to the profession don't know how. "A lot of marketers aren't educated about these best practices," Ashery says. For e-mail marketers to be successful, they don't have a choice: Either they use best practices, or their e-mails will get marketed as spam, making them worthless.

The rise of spam, and the subsequent rise to protect in boxes from it, means that e-mail marketers must vigilantly protect their reputations. Simple things such as deleting bad e-mail addresses can prevent e-mail marketers from being confused with spammers, who have high bounce-back rates because most of their distribution lists have phony addresses.

The site is still less than a year old and has yet to reach the critical mass Ashery envisions for it. But like any other open-source site, he expects it will grow by word-of-mouth, or in this age, through forwarded e-mails.