A study surveyed by Datran Media shows 80% of marketers rank email the best performing marketing medium. I won’t doubt about this finding and I also believe that the majority of marketers in this region, particularly in the B2B sectors, share the same preference when it comes to e-marketing.

There are lots of email marketing studies and practice guidelines being conducted and published in all these years. But the emphases are always from the marketer/sender side. In view of the email marketing supply chain, email recipients play a big role. So let’s talk the recipient side practice.

How easy an email address can be given out? There are so many occasions which you will provide your email address without second thought. For instance, when an email address is required to complete a registration, you will then type it out, hit the submit in no time. It is always the privacy policy, the disclaimer, the legal and ethical presentation that gains your trust to submit your email contact. Sometimes your email address is simply a pass-along and it ends up saved in the marketers’ blast list.

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Your inbox is vulnerable after you hand in the email address. As a marketer, permission-based marketing is what I’ve advocated for a very long time. But I also have to admit that, the understanding towards the principle and the code of practice for permission-based marketing, to many marketers, is still very arbitrary.

Because of the opt-out practice, marketers have an excuse for the guilt and shame, to send the recipients an email before they opt in to the list. Because of the spam filter, email recipients can relieve from the anger and annoyance, remain indifferent to their inbox vulnerability.

As an email recipient, this is how I deal with my inbox vulnerability. I read a lot of marketing emails in everyday as part of the interests in my profession. I leave the spam filtering job to two spam filters (one at the server side and the other one installed for my email application) and my opt-in subscriptions are managed by the disposable email address. Using disposable email address, I can also monitor the practice of the marketers who promise not to share my email contact without my permission.

If you don’t have any idea about how disposable email works. Try Gmail. For example, if your gmail address is “john.doe@gmail.com” and you need to use it for a trade show registration. Instead of giving out your original gmail address, you can create an instant one like “john.doe+tradeshowname@gmail.com.” This is your unique disposable email address for the trade show registration. Your original gmail address will still receive the messages sent from the trade show organizer. But if you receive an email from someone besides the trade show organizer, that means your email contact has been passed along or resold to a third party.

Here you can read more about gmail disposable email practice. There are few more disposable email services available in the market. Spambox is another one that I will recommend.

Tracking and analytics technology enable marketers to track the email recipients. But so far not much have been introduced for the recipients to keep track of the marketers’ practice. Disposable email address is a practical solution to monitor if privacy has been compromised. If so, the whole email marketing campaign can also be disposable.

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