Joint eco & CSA workshop
Cologne, 10.10.2016 – The eco Competence Group Online Marketing invited guests to a joint event with the Certified Senders Alliance on 10 October 2016, to discuss the legal and technical quality standards for email marketing. The background to the event was the publication of the 6th edition of the eco Directive for Permissible Email Marketing.
The need for quality standards & reputation mechanisms
Dr. Torsten Schwarz, Leader of the eco Competence Group Online Marketing and acknowledged expert in email marketing, began with the first presentation, The need for quality standards & reputation mechanisms. “Email marketing does not always enjoy the best of reputations,” he commented, “but 91 percent of the 500 largest German companies use it, and most of them will increase their budget for it in the next year.” He is therefore very eager for the entire email marketing sector to be mindful of its reputation and to improve it through common standards.
“Sender reputation is becoming more and more important,” according to Schwarz. White-listed emails, he continued, need to be clearly recognizable for man and machine. Thus, he took the audience step-by-step through a set of measures which the eco Competence Group Online Marketing will publish, together with the Certified Senders Alliance, as a Manifest for Clean Email Marketing at the beginning of 2017.
Following this, there was a lively discussion on which of the criteria mentioned are already automatically checked and analyzed by spam filters on the part of the Internet service providers and can result in non-delivery.
How to Opt-In –
An update from the legal perspective
In the following presentation, lawyer Rosa Hafezi, responsible for Legal Consulting & Certification in the Certified Senders Alliance, presented the latest legal developments and the most important aspects of the eco Directive for Permissible Email Marketing. The CSA monitors its members’ compliance with the legal regulations for the sending of emails. It has been functioning since 2003 as an interface between senders and Internet service providers with its whitelisting program.
“Email is still everywhere, but where there’s light, there’s also shadow,” Rosa Hafezi reported. In 2015 alone, the eco Internet Complaints Office received more than 190,000 individual justified complaints that could be traced back to email infringements. “In the end, more than 60 percent of all emails being sent today are spam,” the lawyer continued.
She went on to discuss a range of measures for protecting brand reputation. These ranged from the avoidance of or interaction with unsatisfied customers through to legally certain permission, and examples of when one can compliantly invoke an existing customer relationship. “Ultimately, it’s not only the reputation that is at risk”, said Hafezi. “Legal disputes often bring avoidable high costs with them.”
DKIM, DMARC & Co. –
Quality standards for email marketing
Alexander Zeh, Engineering Manager at the Certified Senders Alliance, then went into the technical aspects of the eco Directive for Permissible Email Marketing. The first step is to ensure a consistent IP reputation with the Internet service provider, in order to have a good chance of getting your emails delivered.
A first step to improve reputation at the technical level is the use and the correct configuration of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). In this way, the Internet Service Provider can already confirm, by means of the IP addresses listed, whether the sender given in the email is the actual sender, Zeh explained. “DKIM is like an identity check using a digital signature. So the received can not only check the sender, but can also check whether certain features of the email have been changed.”
However, given that here also there are possibilities for spoofing, the Certified Senders Alliance recommends the additional use of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance). This technique can help if further validation problems occur despite SPF and DKIM. “DMARC is exceptionally effective,” according to the email engineer. “In large companies like Twitter, the sending of fake emails was drastically reduced immediately after implementation.” DMARC can therefore help effectively against phishing and delivers very good reports on whether and who is attempting to send emails improperly in your name. The trend amongst Internet service providers will take greater account of these measures in the next few years.
Following this, Alexander Zeh led a discussion – filling in for Sven Krohlas (Mailsecurity Specialist, 1&1 Mail & Media GmbH) – on how Internet service providers currently position themselves on the individual issues. One point that was very intensively discussed was the fact that, alongside validation of the sender, user engagement is being more and more intensively analyzed. “Emails from senders that are not regularly opened and read, or are even deleted unread, will in future be more strongly filtered by ISPs – particularly for mobile applications,” Alexander Zeh explained. So here, it also remains important to deliver relevant content to the user, so as not to damage your reputation ranking at the ISPs in this way.
The eco Competence Group Online Marketing will offer this workshop again in 2017 in cooperation with the Certified Senders Alliance.
Further Information
- The 2016 Workshop Agenda
- Photos of the event on our Flickr-Album
