Stupid Top-10 Watch: Dumbest … List … Ever

For the stupidest top-10 list of 2010—yes, it’s only January, but it’s difficult to imagine this one being topped—look no further than the top-10 list of e-mail service providers published last week by an outfit called TopSEOs.

Besides claiming to evaluate things it can’t evaluate, actually being an existing e-mail service provider apparently wasn’t a requirement for inclusion.

According to TopSEOs, the top-10 e-mail service providers in descending order are ExactTarget, Topica, My Emma, StreamSend, Mailworkz.com, EmailLabs, DoubleClick [yes, DoubleClick], VerticalResponse, Constant Contact, and iContact.

OK, let’s start with the obvious: DoubleClick has been out of the e-mail business since 2006 when the firm sold its e-mail unit to marketing services provider Epsilon.

Also, the TopSEOs list names David Rosenblatt as DoubleClick’s CEO. One problem: Rosenblatt left Google—which acquired DoubleClick in 2007—in May.

TopSEOs also gives each firm ratings on various aspects of their business using a circle symbol much like Consumer Reports does.

For example, TopSEOs gave eight of the ten firms full circles under the heading “delivery rate,” while giving DoubleClick and Constant Contact each an empty circle. [Kind of makes sense for DoubleClick since it hasn’t delivered a commercial e-mail for four years.]

However, as has been pointed out here repeatedly, the main levers for controlling e-mail deliverability are in the list owner’s hands, not the ESP’s. When a marketer experiences deliverability troubles, the first place a consultant will look is at the marketer’s e-mail address acquisition practices, not at its ESP.

Did someone in the marketing department just add a bunch of garbage names to the file? Have the firm’s e-mail-acquisition permission practices just been loosened up because someone believed the list wasn’t growing fast enough? Did some C-level empty suit just force the e-mail manager to double e-mail frequency, resulting in a slew of spam complaints?

Notice none of these questions are about areas under the ESP’s control. Hence, claiming to assess an e-mail software and/or service provider’s delivery is ridiculous.

In any case, there is still another troubling aspect to TopSEOs’ top-10 list of e-mail service providers: ExactTarget and DoubleClick—when it was in the e-mail business—don’t belong on the same list as Constant Contact, iContact and the others.

While eight of the 10 companies on the list are small-business focused, ExactTarget caters to larger businesses. Moreover, if DoubleClick were still a standalone company with an e-mail unit, comparing it to Constant Contact would be like comparing Ernst & Young to Intuit QuickBooks.

Yes, this was one silly list alright. But there’s got to be a business model in there somewhere. Makes me wonder if actually trying to learn about vendors’ businesses for the last 14 years has been a big waste of time.

An e-mail sent to TopSEOs’ press contact yesterday asking about the glaring discrepancies of its top 10 e-mail service provider list hasn’t yet been answered.