SAN FRANCISCO -- One guy's spam is another guy's ground-level moneymaking opportunity, or his chance to see the latest deal at SuperMegaCorp or to get the newest MP3 from his favorite hair band.
In other words, one man's spam is another man's prized e-mail.
At least that's the way Derek Scruggs, a master of e-mail marketing, sees the world. "Spam is really in the eye of the beholder," said Scruggs, during his keynote lecture at Spamcon, the anti-spam conference occurring here this week. "I've seen people complain about the strangest things. I've spent a lot of time asking regular people -- not spammers and not anti-spammers -- what they think spam is, and they say that some of what we do is OK."
It's a bit of an understatement to say that Scruggs was addressing a crowd that didn't quite jibe with his liberal views toward e-mail marketing. For the most part, the people here are hardened spam-fighters. They've been in the trenches -- the ISP abuse desks, where switchboards light up like Christmas trees whenever a spammer strikes, or at mail servers, which threaten to buckle when a fresh load of spam gets unloaded into the system.
Quite understandably, then, they saw him as an enemy -- even though, truth be told, Scruggs' e-mail methods are among the more courteous in the e-mail marketing business.
"When I say I'm an e-mail marketer, I'm referring to kind-of-opt-in mail," he said, eliciting some nervous laughter in the crowd. By this, he meant that he is not into "confirmed opt-in," which is the gold standard of e-mail marketing, the only kind of mail marketing that anti-spammers don't really mind.
In a confirmed opt-in setup, you are sent an e-mail that asks you confirm that you indeed signed up to be on someone's marketing list. If you're sure you want to be there, you're asked to reply to the message.
But while anti-spammers like this deal, marketers don't. "I've seen the confirmation process reduce conversion rates to 30 percent," Scruggs said. Essentially, he meant that only three out of 10 people who said they'd like to be on someone's list bothered to reply to the confirmation message.
Now, anti-spammers take this as evidence that people are ignoring the confirmation message, and that they don't really want to be on the list. But Scruggs said that the numbers refute this: "While a confirmed list is more responsive, you actually get a better return on investment from an unconfirmed opt-in list, and I've seen better total ROI's from opt-out."
An opt-out list is the kind you have to ask to be removed from; the default is to include your address. But Scruggs took pains to differentiate "opt-out" mail from run-of-the-mill spam. In his definition of opt-out, you start getting mail from a company that already has a relationship with you -- for example, a website from which you've made some purchases.
He said that he's completely against mail that comes from a company that just happens upon your e-mail address through a mailing list it purchased or by scouring the Web. "That's not opt-anything," he said.
Still, Scruggs' numbers prove something fundamental -- unsolicited e-mail works. If you suddenly started getting commercial e-mail from a company that knows your address -- your credit card company, say, or your favorite magazine -- it's not altogether out of the question that you might start purchasing more from that firm, even if they don't ask permission to mail you.
This conversation didn't sit too well with the anti-spammers in the crowd, obviously. Scruggs, who used to work at a mail outsourcing company called MessageMedia, described his run-ins with postmasters at ISPs who would block messages from his servers because they thought he was spamming.
Scruggs, of course, says that he wasn't a spammer. He handled mail for legitimate companies such as Dell and E-Trade. And when he called mail admins at ISPs to let them know they were blocking mail from these firms, they'd be surprised. "They'd say, 'We don't know why we blocked you. You were probably spamming us.'"
When he said this, some in the audience -- who had themselves managed mail servers at ISPs -- agreed. "You were sending them unsolicited e-mail -- they were blocking your server because it was sending unsolicited e-mail," someone yelled.
Surprisingly, the opposition wasn't as virulent as one might have guessed. The funny thing was that by the end of his talk, people started to see things Scruggs' way. They realized that e-mail marketing was going to remain, and that if it was going to happen, they'd rather have Scruggs' somewhat OK methods, than those of more uncaring e-mailers.
