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Well essentially where we are going in the future really revolves around the concept
of convergence. It's about saying that it's up to the customer now -- the customer is
king. And especially with the new ways that the ISPs are working. It used to be that the
ISPs would simply look at your message and say: "Well does it have any spammy keywords?
If it does we're going to blacklist it, we're going to throw it away. If it comes
from an IP that we've seen sending us spammy keywords in the past then we are going to
block all that." And of course that was very easy for spammers to work around and
it wasn't particularly effective.
And so now, the ISPs are starting to say: "How are the users responding to our mailings?
What's the reaction of the people?" Because it turns out people can filter mail a lot
better than automated system. So they are looking and saying: "What do the people
think of these messages?"
And the next step the ISPs are taking is to not look at the people as a group and determine
what they consider to be good or bad but to look at every individual's preference and
say: "How do I respond to certain types of mail that are coming to me?" And base
their filtering decisions on that. So that it's really personal and relevant to me.
And in turn, the senders have to do the same thing. They have to look and say: "How can
we be more relevant to our customer? How can we accommodate our customers' preferences?"
So that's how multi-channel and some of the other technologies come into play -- is
it's becoming more and more important for our senders and our customers to personalize
everything to an individual user.
Which means not only doing a template substitution -- it's no longer acceptable to say, "Dear
Mike, here's our latest email" -- that's not enough personalization anymore. They need
to look at what do I like, what have I purchased in the past, what am I going to be interested
in in the future, because if I don't have interest in what's being sent to me, I'm
going to throw it away. Or worse, I'm going to hit the spam button and decrease the reputation
of the sender.
In addition to that, they have to look and say: "How do I want to receive my mail?
Do I want to receive email all the time?" Not necessarily, maybe I want to receive a
text. If I'm standing at an airport gate and they want to send me an alert about the
fact that my flight's been delayed or there's a gate change -- they don't send me an
email, they need to send me an SMS message, because that's what I'm going to receive
immediately. That's going to cause my phone to actually send me a special alert or special
tone to tell me that I have an SMS message. And I'm going to catch that and pay attention
to that much sooner. So by accommodating and starting to recognize how I want to receive
messages, as well as what messages I want to receive, our senders are going to be more
effective and that's what we are looking to power.