Archive for the ‘Email and the Law’ Category
Posted by Rob Ropars on June 1st, 2009
By now you’ve probably heard that on April 24, the Canadian government introduced a bill that would serve as Canada’s answer to the US CAN-SPAM Act. Known officially as the “Electronic Commerce Protection Act” (herein ECPA), it strives to establish new legislation around commercial email communications, including rules for opt-in and opt-out procedures, sender identification, and consumer privacy. This process is still in flux so it’s best to monitor the situation and wait for the final provisions before acting. That said, the early details do highlight at least five key differences between ECPA and CAN-SPAM.
Taken at first glance, this bill is both potentially stricter than CAN-SPAM and somewhat ambiguous in some of the areas it covers. Let’s take a look…
Requires advance permission to send commercial email
One area of ambiguity is a reference to allowing messages to be sent if “implied consent” exists between the sender and the recipient during the 18 months prior to the email. If you’re maintaining a strict opt-in/permission list, then this shouldn’t be an issue. Otherwise there may be some question about whether you can email specific people.
CAN-SPAM differs in that technically the law doesn’t outlaw one unsolicited message. It essentially allows anyone to mail anyone else at least once (as long as you include and honor any opt-out requests). Some ESPs (including SubscriberMail) take a more stringent stance (more in line with ECPA) requiring clients to only send to permission lists. Assuming you and/or your ESP are following best practices and only sending permission-based emails, then you’re ECPA-compliant already.
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Posted by Drew Miller on May 27th, 2009
An email newsletter (aka e-newsletter and eNewsletter) is often the cornerstone of an email marketing program. They are often used by companies to inform and educate their readers on various subjects of interest – anything from fashion to home improvement. Regardless of the industry, most newsletters serve one primary purpose: reader engagement.
Email newsletters typically contain multiple articles in order to appeal to a few different reader tastes. The main goal, more often than not, is to drive readers to your website to engage further with your company or brand. To get the most out of your e-newsletter efforts, plan it out like a 3-course meal.
The Appetizer
When a reader opens your message, you literally have seconds before they make the decision to spend time with you or move on to the next best thing. Using a sentence or two to entice the reader with a tease of what’s to come is one of the best ways to drive clicks. This is your appetizer – hopefully delicious enough to keep them wanting more, without making them full.
The Main Course
If readers click on the link you provided in your email to continue the meal, it means an order has been placed for the main course – your landing page. The obvious objective here should be to keep customers interested, engaged and ultimately satisfied. Make the reading experience easy on the eyes to keep your readers focused on finishing what they started. A landing page shouldn’t be a buffet of distractions, it should leave them licking their chops, using a wet wipe and singing to the tune of “mmm, mmm, mmm”.
The Dessert
Dessert is the ultimate customer temptation and should follow the main course quickly before second thoughts pop up. Of course its not for everyone, and should align appropriately with the overall goals and objectives of your eNewsletter. But for those who do see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the prospect of getting readers to buy after a satisfied main course is a good one. The verbiage at the end of your landing page, overall design, navigation choices, etc. should all lead your customers to a product or offering that is too tempting to pass up.
It’s important to remember that no 1 meal fits all. We all have different appetites so do some testing before you offer something that might give your readers food poisoning. By planning your email newsletter like a 3-course meal, you will be well on your way to a more satisfied, more full customer.
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Posted by Dave McCue on April 15th, 2009
If you climbed into the ring against a heavyweight boxer, wouldn’t you want more than just a mouthguard to protect yourself from harm? Email marketers should think of themselves the same way—CAN-SPAM compliance is your mouthguard, and that heavyweight opponent (in the form of thousands of email subscribers) is poised to start swinging.
Plenty of email marketers wisely learn the ins and outs of CAN-SPAM laws early on in the process to protect themselves from harm, but too many mistakenly believe that adhering to the rules of CAN-SPAM means they don’t have to worry about SPAM complaints. This is far from the truth; as long as “Junk” and “Spam” buttons exist on every popular email client, any message being sent is at risk for SPAM complaints.
So what’s a marketer to do? Don’t get complacent just because you’re compliant; there are always gray areas.
Before every email marketing campaign, think carefully about any potential negative reactions the campaign might cause. Your standard approach may be enough to satisfy the law of the land, but the moment you set foot in a recipient’s inbox you are no longer in control. CAN-SPAM says you can email a recipient one time without his/her permission; does the recipient know that? Not only is it a mistake to assume that your audience knows what truly constitutes a SPAM email, but it’s even more unrealistic to believe they worry about the damage they could be doing to your reputation as a sender by marking your message as SPAM.
To put it simply, the best defense against SPAM complaints is common sense, but it’s an approach that is all-too-often pushed aside. Never forget that all of the email addresses on your mailing list, as well as any other addresses you “acquire,” represent actual people. Try their patience, and they’ll act the way people do.
To go back to the boxing analogy, if compliance is your mouthguard, let common sense be your headgear. If you find yourself justifying an email strategy by saying “technically, this is totally legit,” you’re going to want to stop and re-evaluate things. If it means sending less email—if it means sending to less people—it might help you take a lot fewer punches in the ring.
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on April 29th, 2006
I gave a speech to the Vermont/New Hampshire Direct Marketing Group on Friday about email marketing strategy. Well I guess you can call it a speech. I was scheduled to be there in person, and a last minute family emergency made it impossible for me to travel, so thanks to the organizers, I did a webinar to a room full of people. It was an interesting way to present, and thanks to my friend Bud Reed at Timberline Interactive, I was able to interact with the audience (Bud was a great facilitator).
During the question and answer session, one of the attendees asked about one of the points I made. I indicated that not only is it bad form to use prechecked opt-in boxes, but in my opinion (as a non-lawyer) it is a CAN-SPAM violation.
I notice that direct marketers, particularly catalogers tend to love this technique. It is kind of a "let me trick you into opting in, and if you don’t look to closely, I may trap you as a subscriber" technique. This is a throwback to the old postal days of let me do everything to build the biggest list, because if I don’t sell you something, I can sell your name to some other direct marketer, and make some money off you that way.
It just doesn’t make sense in the email world, and anyone who is prechecking boxes just doesn’t get it. This person made the point that before they prechecked the box, no one was signing up for their newsletter. When they prechecked the box, hardly anyone unchecked in and rarely did they get a complaint. Well, does this mean it is working?
Sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper to find out what is really going on. In this case, the only way to get on this company’s email list was by also requesting a postal catalog. No catalog request, no email newsletter. Additionally, there was no easy way to get to the opt-in form from the home page. So where is all this going? Well I guess what it says to me is just because your customer is not checking the box doesn’t mean you have to check it for them. It may just mean you are making it to hard for them to check it. Check it out.
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 10th, 2006
In the past week, both Iowa and Hawaii have jumped on the child protection band wagon with because of what has to be one of the most misdirected lobbying campaigns designed to get legislators to believe that one state’s law can impact the flow of spam and pornography on the internet. As the father of two children, I abhor some of the pornographic emails and adult oriented promotions that flood inboxes. It is easy to get any parent or normal adult upset at the thought of such email ending up in a child’s email box. That’s why lobbyists seem to have no difficulty in getting legislative sponsors for the ridiculous child registry legislation that has been surfacing in many states.
There is a major missing component in this concept. Any organization willing to send such email today is unlikely to be deterred by the laws in one state, and this is complicated by the fact that much of this material is being sent from foreign countries. With limited state resources, it is doubtful whether the states of Hawaii or Iowa will be sending the state police to Russia very soon to arrest the sender of any such mail.
What is not difficult is to see the financial motivation behind this legislation. On the surface, the concept of new dollars flowing into state coffers from emailers who have to comply with the laws sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, this money is going to flow from legitimate businesses that sell products that shouldn’t be sold to minors (i.e., automobiles, real estate, motorcycles). These types of organizations that are legitimately sending relevant permission-based email will want to comply with the laws. However it doesn’t take a Harvard economics professor to calculate that sending email in the future will become financially prohibitive if each state is charging more to process an email list against their registry than many companies are paying to send their mail, and these costs are incurred on a monthly basis. When you dig a little deeper, and you look at the two states where such legislation has passed, Michigan and Utah, and realize that 80% of the revenue from those two states is ending up in the pockets of the single company that is able to process and house the registries, that the true objective of the lobbyists, who are so persuasively moving legislators is revealed.
The one good thing in the entire procedure is knowing that sometimes the legislative process does work, and sanity rules. Recently Representative Jack Franks of Illinois made the decision to withdraw a similar bill, which he had initially sponsored after learning the true impact and effects that this poorly conceived legislation would cause.
So for now, keep your eye on all of the states that haven’t passed this legislation and hope that other legislators see through this thin veneer of deception and misdirection. If you would like to read more about how legislators in Utah and Michigan were hoodwinked, read Brian Livingson’s great article published last year
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