Kevin Hillstrom draws some interesting boxes around his five flavors of customers. Since we do retention marketing, we at iPost almost exclusively focus on the brand-aware customer boxes (Kevin’s “organic” and “begging” buyers).  It’s a great place to be, since we leverage that opt-in permission to generate 40x – 50x ROI in the email channel for our clients.

But we can even do quite a bit better:  if you could place all your email subscribers at opposite ends of a organic / begging spectrum, you’re able to:

• Stop discounting to the organic, brand-enthusiast customers (they’re going to respond strongly anyway)

Email marketers apparently just love to lower their margins and leave money on the table.

The mania for discounts is driven to a large degree by the standard practice of blasting emails to every possible email address. When presented with a business downturn, the Pavlovian response is to blast out discounts. The more discounts the merrier – too bad, though, about the impact on the bottom-line.

In reality, customers are not the same. Some will buy from you without regular discounts, some will buy from you with minimal discounts and some will require on-going discounts.

With remarkably little flag-waving¹ the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) today published new updates to the venerable Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP, RFC5321) and Internet Message Format (RFC5322) standards. These documents are the most recent reflection of more than twenty-six years of effort that began when Jon Postel and Dave Crocker penned² the early drafts of Request For Comments 821 and 822. Those standards created the email universe as we know it today, building on the cooperative structure I mentioned in an earlier post.

Recently I shed some light on what happens behind the scenes when an email message is sent on its way. The “store and forward” model is not a perfect guarantee of delivery, but is very robust in the face of temporary breakdowns. You may have noticed, however, that if a message has to be passed along through several “hops”, only the final “hop” can determine exactly when or even whether the message has reached its intended recipient. To deal with this, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the standard way to transmit email over the Internet, defines all the elements necessary to complete a successful transfer of email and to report either a temporary service interruption or a complete failure.

Networking consultant Keith Moore doesn’t ask for return receipts to confirm that his email has been delivered. This is somewhat ironic, as he was co-author of the 1996 specification that generates a confirmation message when an e-mail safely reaches its destination server. Moore, an advocate of measures to confirm email delivery, is “frustrated because end users’ e-mail software still lacks the design capability to use the server-to-server messages about completed email delivery” without user intervention, reports the New York Times.