BlackList Monitor Gives Businesses Options to Ensure Opt-in Email Gets Through
Email may be fast becoming the preferred means of business
communications and marketing, but, according to Karen Fegarty,
it is only an effective tool if your messages are getting
through to your opt-in clients. This is not always the case. "You can find a lot of data that shows that information is
not getting through by email, and the impact that has on
any given business. AOL currently blocks about 80 per cent
of all email to its users, data from Return Path suggests,
on average, 22 per cent of legitimate opt-in email
wasn't delivered to user inboxes, and the costs to business
of incorrectly blocked opt-in email is expected to reach
$419 million by 2008." Why is such a high percentage of business email not getting
through? For the most part, it comes down to the growing
phenomenon of blacklists. A blacklist is a database of
internet addresses (IPs) that have either been identified
as, or are being used by companies and individuals to send
spam. There are many blacklists in existence and service
and bandwidth providers (ISPs) subscribe to these lists to
filter out the spam that their customers receive. In theory,
it's a sensible solution to a significant problem, but the
lists have their flaws, which means that many legitimate
opt-in messages are being blocked from reaching business
clients. Because it only takes one complaint, it is very
easy for a company's IP to be added ? and erroneously ? to
a high-use blacklist like SpamCorp. Also, many blacklists
add IPs in blocks, so if one user of an IP is labeled a
spammer, any business using it will be penalized. And there
have been instances where companies have falsely reported
competitors as spammers, just to gain a market advantage. Fegarty's company, MailWorkZ, has come up with one of the
most effective tools available to avoid erroneously blocked
opt-in email ? BlackList Monitor. Launched in 2004, the
web-based service actively monitors, on an hourly basis,
75 of the most popular blacklists, providing clients with
automated email notifications if their IPs are found on
any of these lists. It also provides clients with the
best available information on how to contact and negotiate
the removal of their IPs from any blacklist. According to Fegarty, the genesis of BlackList Monitor came
from problems that MailWorkZ and its clients were having
sending email to clients. "Not only do we have an email marketing software product
Broadc@st - that companies can buy and use to send their
own campaigns, we also conduct email campaigns on behalf
of clients through our own servers." Seeing the deliverability of a major client's email decline
due to blacklists, Fegarty and her team knew they needed
an effective solution, and fast: "We needed to determine
exactly where we were listed on a real-time basis so we
could take immediate steps to be removed. We didn't have
time to check the lists daily, let alone hourly, or to find
information to negotiate a way off the lists. It needed to
be an instant, automated process." With this in mind, MailWorkZ spent about four months of
development work over the course of a year coming up with
a solution using the .Net platform. During that time,
the company conducted extensive research, wading through
thousands of blacklists to determine the ones that were
checked by the majority of major ISPs, how the lists
determined legitimate email, and how to negotiate a way
out of these databases. Since its launch in June 2004, MailWorkZ has registered
more than 400 active BlackList Monitor accounts, and is
monitoring more than 1000 IPs. Client renewal rate,
adds Fegarty, is over 50%, and feedback has been uniformly
positive. "Clients are indicating that this is a necessary tool,
improving their email marketing success. They've also
indicated that they appreciate the fact that it is easy
to use, and how beneficial the removal information is
for them." Fegarty says that the company is focusing its marketing
efforts on the UK and building greater market share in
the U.S. Mark Campbell is a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based marketing
and communications consultant. He can be reached at
krambell@ns.sympatico.ca. More information about MailWorkZ (http://www.mailworkz.com) and the BlackList Monitor (http://www.blacklistmonitor.com) products can be seen by
visiting their sites.
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