Questions for Michael Mayor of NetCreations
NetCreations President Michael Mayor has long advocated consumer privacy and accountability in list-building, and these stances have become more important than ever as the spam scourge has taken hold.
NetCreations President Michael Mayor has long advocated consumer privacy and accountability in list-building, and these stances have become more important than ever as the spam scourge has taken hold.
NetCreations President and COO Michael Mayor has been a persistent voice of sanity in the war-torn email marketing landscape since 1998 — the year he joined the online messaging upstart as one of its first employees. Mayor has long advocated consumer privacy and accountability in the list-building business, a philosophy held throughout his 18 years in direct marketing. In fact, it was largely this stance that landed him the chairman post for the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s E-mail Committee, which last month issued its first set of email ethics guidelines.
Mayor insists he has always managed for quality, and NetCreations has always been an outspoken advocate of opt-in, specificially double opt-in. He takes pride in the fact that NetCreations’ average response rate across its 500 lists was four percent in 2002, while its bounce/unsubscribe rate was just one percent.
ChannelSeven.com recently sat down with Mayor to discuss a range of issues currently shaping the email marketing space, including email append, list deterioration, and how the IAB’s guidelines have been received.
That’s like asking, “Is the quality of water deteriorating?” It depends on where you’re drinking it. List quality varies greatly from list manager to list manager. Unfortunately, I see a lot of email lists being managed poorly today. Many list managers are managing email as a necessary evil and don’t really have much expertise in this area. Others take a “blast and burn” approach and are in it for the short term. Managing a quality email list requires long-term dedication and a tremendous amount of expertise.
Quality lists are out there. My personal frustration is that clients who have tested and found the winning formula are not exactly motivated to allow us to broadcast their secrets to the masses. I know several marketers who love that their competitors have given up on email and they’re not about to convince them to come back. They’d much rather see the demand for email lists slow so they can have the market to themselves. Right now, they do.
We are currently working with a major financial institution on what we call “Append and Send.” In this process, we match their records to ours. However, if they want to contact the matches, it must be through us and the topic of communication must fall within the list member’s requested areas. This way we are protecting our list owner’s, our list member’s and our marketer’s best interests.
Spam is not the disease, it’s the symptom. The disease is a lack of education in email marketing. Yes, there is the odd scam, but most spam does contain a legitimate sales pitch. This is often indicative of poor marketer education or reseller programs that are completely out of control. We as an industry need to be proactive in teaching marketers how to utilize this channel properly. In addition, manufacturers need to be educated that when they turn a blind eye to their reseller channel, bad things happen that can hurt their brand. Education is the best anti-spam tool, and it was the main reason I agreed to chair the IAB’s E-mail Committee.
NetCreations has a full-time staff member whose job is simply to work with ISPs. Every email provider should have someone in that role. If you have a good relationship with an ISP, they’ll call you when something happens.
The next initiative the IAB’s E-mail Committee is tackling is this very subject. We have major ISPs, email vendors and marketers as members, so it’s the perfect forum to get everyone in the same room to finally get consensus on this issue. I’m confident we can resolve it.