Contributed by: Karlyn Morrissette
E-Marketing Strategist, Web Producer, Dartmouth College

In our culture, outsourcing is often considered a four-letter word, conjuring up images of American jobs being shipped overseas to India or China, where they do the same work for pennies on the dollar. But outsourcing isn’t always a bad thing. It can allow an institution to focus on what it does best (presumably providing an education to students) rather than expend human resources and dollars on technology infrastructure.

Mass email sending for your email marketing program is one of those pieces of infrastructure that is better left to the professionals. I can honestly say I’ve never heard a college make a case for why they need to send all of their email in-house. IT people are usually very uppity on this point — why give up “free” email to pay a vendor for something that can’t do as much as the in-house system?

The problem with this is two-fold:

1. There are hundreds of Email Service Providers (ESP) out there. If you can’t find one with the features you want, you just aren’t looking.
2. Nothing is free. The internal staff costs to maintain an in-house system far exceed what you would pay for an external one.

Your average ESP will charge around one cent per message sent. If you send 500,000 emails a year, that’s $5,000. If you send 1.5 million emails a year, that’s $15,000. And so on and so forth. If you want database integration, that’s going to cost you a bit more — say a buy-in of $40K for the first year. Included in those prices is typically everything from support to maintaining deliverability standards to regular updates with new features. Any of these numbers could put your budget manager into shock (”FOR EMAIL???”), but consider the following: To do an in-house “free” system, you’re going to have to assign at least one full-time employee to it to do it right. Can you show me an IT person whose salary (plus benefits) is going to be less than $5,000? Or $15,000? Or $40,000? If you can, I doubt that person is qualified to know what to do should they come in one day and find the institution blacklisted from major email providers like Yahoo and thus defeating the point of having an in-house “free” solution in the first place.

In this case, outsourcing is clearly the best solution. Simply put, you get more functionality and better support for a fraction of the cost that it would take you to implement and maintain an internal system. There are a lot of things that IT departments can do great in-house. This is not one of them. Save yourself a headache and let the vendors handle it.

__
Karlyn Morissette is an e-marketing strategist and web developer, specializing in higher education. Currently the Web Producer in the Development Office at Dartmouth, she is responsible for advising the office on e-marketing strategy and maintaining multiple web properties that bring millions of dollars worth of online donations each year. Karlyn is one of the most prolific bloggers in the higher education community. In addition to www.karlynmorissette.com, she is a regular author on www.doteduguru.com.

Contributed by: Tina Stults
Direct Marketing Manager, Stein Communications

If you have a valid email address, chances are you’ve been spammed. In fact, it’s highly likely that when you sit down at your computer and open your email client, the majority of the messages flooding your inbox originate from email marketers, legitimate or not. You may have even gone to great lengths to protect your email address from spammers by installing a spam blocker service, unsubscribing your address from multiple mailing lists, or changing your email address to restore a moderate (and fleeting) level of anonymity.

But somehow, the spammers always find you.

Of course, there are those companies, institutions, and organizations that are on the up-and-up. Permission-based email marketing is a thriving and rapidly expanding industry, bolstered by its speed, cost efficiency, and ability to reach customers and prospects on a personal level. For most of us, permission-based email marketing is an essential component of our integrated marketing campaigns, supporting other print and interactive media.

Over the past several years, the government and other public and private entities have begun instituting measures with the intent to reign in spammers, whose messages clog our inboxes, and pave the way for legitimate email marketers to communicate more effectively with their target audiences. You’ve heard the words tossed around — CAN-SPAM, spam filters, whitelists — and you’ve likely taken steps to protect your own email address(es) with one or more of these tools. But have you also gotten wind of one of the newest regulatory measures in email marketing — dubbed by some as the “email tax”?

In 2003, a company by the name of Goodmail Systems launched their CertifiedEmail service, “the highest standard in email certification, to provide a safe and reliable class of email for the benefit of consumers, legitimate senders and mailbox providers.” CertifiedEmail essentially requires marketers to provide documentation about their history, credit rating, and commercial email use; companies and organizations that pass the test are charged a fee — approximately $2 per 1,000 messages — to ensure delivery of their email.

AOL and Yahoo! have recently partnered with Goodmail on its CertifiedEmail program, a move that has many email marketers up in arms. Approximately 73.5 million adults — half of the adult population in the U.S. — have registered email addresses with one of the two domains. Under the CertifiedEmail system, approved marketers will pay a premium every time they send a message to a recipient with an AOL or Yahoo! domain name.

So how does the email certification process work in action? Without getting into the weighty details, if you’re trying to send an email and you haven’t been validated by the CertifiedEmail service, your message most likely will be stripped of its images and hyperlinks. Participation in the plan ensures that your recipients will receive the email in its intended form.

Since AOL announced its intent to implement Goodmail’s service, a 50-member coalition — whose roster includes organizations such as MoveOn.org, Civic Action, and Gun Owners of America — has joined forces to fight the initiative, launching a web site at DearAOL.com, where individuals can sign a petition protesting the move, share their opinions through blog posts, and find out how to take further action.

The web site states that “AOL’s ‘email tax’ is the first step down a slippery slope that will harm the Internet itself. The Internet is a revolutionary force for free speech, civic organizing, and economic innovation precisely because it is open and accessible to all Internet users equally.” The site’s open letter to AOL also asserts that the pay-to-send measure won’t prevent spam — “in fact, this plan assumes that spam will continue and that mass mailers will be willing to pay to have their emails bypass spam filters.”

Goodmail, AOL, and Yahoo! stand by their assertion that the certification service is designed to guarantee delivery of emails generated by legitimate organizations while keeping spammers and fraudulent marketers at bay. However, AOL has backpedaled, making the CertifiedEmail service optional and promising to keep the Enhanced Whitelist they’ve used in recent years. They have also stated that “legitimate non-profit and advocacy groups” will not be charged to have emails certified and delivered — good news to many colleges and universities who operate as non-profit institutions.

In the meantime, Yahoo!’s implementation will be limited to “transactional” messages only — bank statements, purchase receipts, etc. The ISP has assured businesses and organizations that they will be able to “send email to Yahoo! email users at no cost in exactly the way they always have.”

There of plenty of people on both side of the fence with opinions about the CertifiedEmail program. Folks on the pro side argue that the Goodmail system will protect legitimate marketers and the integrity of individual email accounts. Opponents cite the tenets of free speech and equal access that are among our most basic rights. Regardless of your position, chances are that for now, your institution is protected by its status as a non-profit. But as our cluttered inboxes have proven, this battle is far from over.

By now you may have received a letter from us introducing CommunityYou and now want to know more about how it might help yield your class this summer. Learn about this innovative solution and its benefits to your institution from the comfort of your office with Stein’s hosted webinars each Thursday at 11:00 EST starting April 20, 2006. Sign up today by emailing Tia Lane at tlane@steincommunications.com.

PersonalizationPlus is a streamlined web solution designed to help your admissions team more easily achieve your institution’s recruitment objectives. We’ve bundled a number of exciting web features all into one solution, including: web-based contact management, broadcast email, community building for admitted students, online journaling, and web site personalization. Learn about this comprehensive admission solution during Stein’s hosted webinars on Thursdays at 2:00 EST starting April 20, 2006. Sign up today by emailing Tia Lane at tlane@steincommunications.com.