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When is email marketing spam?
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - November 24, 2000

Marketing via email can be a cheap and effective way of building brand awareness, driving traffic to a website and even selling online. Yes, that's right selling things. The problem is: how do you make sure that your message stays on brand and isn't lumped in with offers to 'Make your business explode' or various pornographic sites or services.

Elsa Weill asked the uk-netmarketing list, "I am currently looking into email marketers... and wondering where 'email marketing' ends and 'email spamming' begins. ... If so, what is your feeling about such email offering - good or bad news for the new media industry? All thoughts welcome."

Andrew Petherick replied, "I can answer this! Spam is effectively unsolicited mail where the recipient has not requested the email he/she is receiving; it's illegal in many places. Next up the ladder comes opt-out, where the recipient has decided to tick a box to say that they would like to be sent emails in the future about that companies products (sometimes allowing that company to pass their email address on to other companies). Finally comes permission-based email, where a person will specifically ask to receive email on a certain subject until they no longer want it. They then remove themselves from the list. With the opt-in method, the consumer is given 100% control, and the marketer achieves extremely high response rates (up to 15%)."

Ashley Pomeroy shared his thoughts on the make-up of spam, "Although technically spam is any mail which is repeated over and over again, I think that dullness is the signifier. Dull stuff is marketing, semi-interesting stuff (porn, pyramid schemes, 'Help Save the Brazilian Rainforests' and 'Beware of GoodTimes') is spam. I think people assume that 'multi-level marketing' schemes, anything which has 'THIS IS PERFECTLY LEGAL!' in the second line, and adverts for Horny Belinda's WebCam are spam, although amusing to read. I delete this, and add the sender to my procmail filter. I don't know why they bother - perhaps it's satire. Standard dull 'Hello and welcome to the N newsletter - lots of promotional guff, plus a competition' email would be marketing. Does anybody jump for glee when the receive a mail from a company with 'Dear [clientname]' at the top, and feel a wave of good cheer as they read about their opportunity to 'source and buy professional services and register for FREE!', or what?"

The line between spam and effective promotional emails is always going to be difficult, particularly as companies try to make their email marketing more effective.

Screen size

Mark Seaman asked the list, "Has anyone got any up to date stats on screen resolution? i.e. what percentage of the UK are at 800x600 vs 1024x768?"

Tom Loosemore replied, "the site is more geek-heavy than most, so I'd expect most a more mainstream site to be even more biased to 800 by 600:

800x600	47.05%
1024x768	35.88%
1280x1024	5.40%
640x480	4.75%
1152x864	4.33%
1600x1200	1.55%
Other	1.01%

Sally Krumholz shared the results of her research on the subject, "This was an interesting question, So I decided to embark on a search. Sadly, I couldn't come up with any UK specific stats. I don't have access to Jupiter or Forrester and I would imagine they have access to more info than I. In any case, I'd be interested in seeing any specific results or links to something related.

Meanwhile, I came up with these links, which essentially say the same thing more or less. The dominant resolution in use is 800x600. I cannot say though if these stats are specifically related to the US or global. I know with respect to the design standard we apply for our clients, we use 800x600. However, we do test our designs for 640x480 to ensure that they are flexible in lower or higher resolutions. :)

Ben Hunt wrote about the guidelines his company uses, "We take this decision at the outset of each project, where we fix the deisgn and testing parameters for each project, depending on the defined target audience. If a site will have a largely commercial (old school) audience, we'll consider 640x and Netscape more, and be more likely to exclude Java and plugin technologies, as commercial users will more likely be constrained to a corporate standard browser... If it's for a youf or new-media audience, the sky's more likely the limit. Generally, we design to work in 640x, unless there's a good reason not to. Likewise, we design without frames, unless there's a strong argument to the contrary."

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