Marketing email clustering into once-a-day packages is an unorthodox proposal that may, at first, seem to be overly revolutionary. It could, however, present significant benefits to marketers, ISPs, and customers alike.
A Quarter Of Each Day Is Lost To Interruptions
Much has been discussed of the future of email marketing, but very little attention has been paid to the overall environment whereby email is received by your prospects. According to the time management software publisher RescueTime, a typical employee checks their email fifty times and utilizes instant messaging seventy-seven times in each eight-hour shift. Basex, an IT research consulting company, recently reported that these constant interruptions cause a loss of 2.1 hours of daily productivity, a decrease in job satisfaction due to stress, and an overall wreckage of attention spans.
Intel and other major corporations have mandated "quiet time" in some of their operations. Each day has specific hours when messaging, email, and even phone contact is forbidden. This policy has borne fruit: the productivity in those particular facilities has skyrocketed. Deloitte & Touche and U.S. Cellular are corporations that have also benefitted from implementing similar plans to restrict electronic interruptions.
The Various Reputation Whitelist Algorithms
Although bona fide email marketing has come a long way in overcoming the stigma of the early attempts at "list-blasting," most email marketing analysts and professionals would agree that if further steps could be taken towards ameliorating the reputation of the industry as a whole, it could be definitely beneficial to all involved: from the brand to the reader.
To arrive at a sender reputation score, there are various algorithms which evaluate a marketing company’s email performance factors for inclusion in a whitelist:
email volume
bounces
complaint rates
spam trap hits
permanence
infrastructure
The problem is this: With countless thousands of ISPs all over the world applying their own individual rules for what differentiates spam from high-reputation email, attempting to implement universal standards into the field of ISP recognition and "safe-passage" is difficult, if not outright impossible. Perhaps it is time to try a completely different approach.
Email Clustering Could Be The Answer
Companies that obtain and - most importantly - maintain high reputation scores would be allowed to form an "email cartel." The purpose of this cartel would be to provide prospects with an agglomeration of a number of "clustered emails" once per day. This "cluster" would essentially be a single unit of multiple emails that would arrive all at one time, but only once in a day. The "cluster" would be recognized by at least the major ISPs as "clean" and thus freed from spam interceptions. Furthermore, each individual reader’s "cluster" would be different as they would still be generated by the internal lists of each marketer.
The benefits of such an approach are numerous for all involved. The email marketers would have to maintain absolutely scrupulous standards for all their email campaigns in order to keep participating in the "cartel;" the ISPs would be able to dedicate fewer resources to the determination of reputation for delivery; and the customer would appreciate the drastic minimization of constant interruption provided by a single "cluster" delivery of all bona fide promotional email once a day. The customer could even specify a preferred time of the day for receiving it!
A Radical Approach Whose Time Has Come
It’s a radical approach and, as such, certainly has various bugs that undoubtedly need to be ironed out (such as the submission to a main originating server and likely a central clearance agency), but the basic tenet may very well be valid. By restricting and pre-packaging a single daily digest of all the truly bona fide marketing emails received by a customer, not only would the reputation of the participating marketers be elevated, but also the reputation of the industry as a whole.
