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Web marketing guru Jim Sterne gives advice on how to successfully utilize customer emails Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

I wanted to ask you, what particular things should email marketers be paying attention to after they send the email that they might not be paying attention to today? Sterne: Well, this is where I prove that I am a consultant, because the answer is, it depends. Let's sit down with each of your readers individually and talk to them about their own needs for an hourly rate. The thing that I want everybody to do is to have goals in mind, and when I talk about web analytics and website measurement, it's the same thing as email -- why are you bothering to send out that email?

But it also seems to me that a lot of email marketers still find themselves far behind. Even the ones who are taking on email marketing are still slow to implement even basic CAN-SPAM compliance. You may know that we did a study of CAN-SPAM compliance, and there's one statistic that I'd like you to comment on that I find fascinating -- 51 percent of the emails sent by more than 1,000 companies, including many Fortune 500 companies, had no working unsubscribe link. How do you account for something like that?

Interview with Loren McDonald, vice president of marketing at EmailLabs Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Not only has it affected the recipient, it has obviously affected legitimate email marketers. What's happening is, on the recipient's side, they're looking at email differently. I'm writing an article right now for a newsletter on how to optimize your opt-in pages. I think that's key. That's where the beginning of the relationship between the subscriber and the company, or the marketer or the sender, begins. The language and the tone of that page are critical in managing expectations.

That, combined with authentication, is going to make a huge dent because it's only the legitimate permission-based email marketers that are able to meet those standards and participate in those programs. So, pretty much the people that aren't being authenticated and have a bad reputation are not going to get through. I think those are two things on the current map. Mike: There are also ideas floating around about adding a cost per email -- either an actual financial cost or a CPU cost for some form of friction. McDonald: Right. I know you've written an article about that.

One of the things we've seen -- and I'm sure you've seen it with customers that come to investigate your service -- is that deliverability is an increasingly big-job challenge for email marketers. How does your company help customers get deliverability? McDonald: Something that I've actually seen in the last couple of months is that the marketplace is sort of catching up to the insiders in the industry.

Do you think this is really changing the way email marketers send campaigns, or has all of this talk been overblown? McDonald: The director of ISP relations and I have a column on ClickZ about email delivery. We wrote a column a couple of months ago on understanding Gmail and how to optimize it. At one level, my message to marketers would be that there are a lot of little nuances that you absolutely need to be aware of. We had a client yesterday that saw that Gmail was sort of mangling one of their emails and deconstructing their codes. It doesn't like cascading style sheets.

How does that affect us as email marketers? I don't know that there's anything drastic on the horizon that would enable them to have massive influence over the industry like they had over the search industry. Mike: We've been talking with Loren McDonald, VP of marketing at EmailLabs. That's EmailLabs.com. I want to thank you so much for your time today, Loren. Our readers will gain value from your insight. Are there any closing thoughts you'd like to add?

Interview with Ralph Wilson on email marketing and e-commerce Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Mike: Let's go to the side of professional email marketers for a moment. You have written a couple of books on email marketing? Wilson: One, called The E-Mail Marketing Handbook. Mike: In that book, you tell people how to get started from the ground up. So, a question to you: What are people doing wrong with their current email marketing activities that they could easily correct? Wilson: Before I comment on that, let me go back and make one more comment on spam. You had asked about the future.

I think in the future commercial email marketers, like myself, are going to have to pay into some certified sender program, and certified senders will be put on white lists. I think that is what the future is going to be. That is why it is so important for Internet marketers and emailers to make sure we are scrupulous about how we send out emails. I recommend double opt-in and confirmed opt-in email. I think it is going to come down to being certified as one of the good guys to get our email through. Mike: Essentially that would be like adding friction or postage to outbound email.

Interview with Jeanne Jennings, Online Marketing Consultant Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

I think there are a lot of email marketers out there using it in very legitimate ways, with lots of integrity, and my hope is that that's what we will have left standing at the end of the battle. Mike: Do you think the ideas of permission marketing and ethical professional marketing are making headway in the industry out there, or is there still a duality, so to speak, in the industry? Jennings: I think the good news is that a lot of people who were really sort of on the fringe in that area -- doing it without integrity -- have gone out of business.

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ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.