A very young industry

Last week I saw a tweet that quoted Joel Book, Director of eMarketing Education at Exacttarget as saying

less than 20% of ppl in #emailmarketing have more than 2 yrs experience

I have this feeling that some of the industry wide issues with conflicts between “frat boys” and “utilitarians” is partly due to the lack of experience on the email marketing side. Contrast that with the ISP side, where many people have 10 or 20 years experience with email.
If we take for a fact that Joel is correct and 80% of email marketers have less than 2 years of experience, how does that affect the way email marketers approach email and delivery issues? More importantly, how does this affect deliverability? Does it affect the perception of email marketing and email marketers by the ISPs and spam blocking companies?
What does it mean for the state of the industry that so few people on one side of the equation have long term experience in email marketing and so many people on the other side of the equation have long term experience with email (and marketing)?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, triggered by one of the session moderators at MAAWG introducing me as “someone who has been in the industry since before there were ESPs.” Yes, I’ve been around a long time, and his comment is accurate, if a bit disturbing.
Being around for as long as I have doesn’t just mean I have experience dealing with different problems, but also provides a deep understanding of where we are now and how we got here. The history of delivery, spam fighting and email marketing are all intertwined but never documented. Knowing that history is vital for mapping the future.
I can’t help but think that the lack of experience of the majority of the people in this industry is hindering delivery and effective email marketing. There are so few of us who could be considered old hands, is that hindering the industry as a whole?

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Delivery emergencies

There is no such thing as a delivery emergency. They just do not happen.
Delivery is fluid, delivery is changing, delivery is complex.
But when delivery goes bad it is not an emergency. There is no need to call up an ISP person at home on a Saturday afternoon and ask them to remove the filters. (And, BTW, experience indicates if you do this that you may have future delivery issues at that ISP.)
I’m sure that people will provide me with examples of delivery emergencies. And, in some cases I might even concede that the receivers will be happy to receive email immediately when it was sent. However, email as a protocol was designed for store and forward. It was not designed to transmit messages instantaneously from sender to receiver. Sure, it works that way much of the time these days. On the whole the Internet is fairly reliable and major servers are connected 24/7 (which wasn’t always the case).
Among many people, particularly recipients and ISP employees, there isn’t the expectation that bulk email is instantaneous. This leads to the belief that delivery problems are not an emergency. Everyone faces them, they get dealt with, life goes on. Demanding an escalation to deal with a “delivery emergency” may backfire and slow down how long it takes to get a response from an ISP.

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The law defines personal information as:

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We’re both looking forward to seeing everyone. Drop by and say hi.

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