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Real Businesses Send Spam, Too!
by: Jerry Weinstock
Unsolicited Commercial Email or Spam has grown at epidemic proportions. It
is rapidly becoming the number one problem that Information Technology
departments deal with on a day-to-day basis, surpassing computer viruses.
The volume and percentage of unwanted email received in business and personal
email inboxes is starting to overwhelm and drown out legitimate email.
Although the vast majority of this bulk email is being perpetrated by individual
spammers and a few large bulk mailers pushing pornography, gambling, get
rich schemes, ‘medicinal cures’ and bootleg software, real businesses
have been caught in the web also by committing several errors. The three
ways a legitimate business falls into the Spam mode are: 1. Legal non-Compliance,
2. Violating Trust, and 3. Lack of Value.
Legal non-Compliance
Through the end of 2003 it was very difficult to comply with Spam laws as
twenty six states had passed their own laws dealing either directly with
the process of sending unsolicited commercial email or the format requirements
of bulk email.
With the passage of the Federal law – “Controlling the Assault
of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003” or better known
as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, it has become a lot easier to understand and
apply the rules. Real businesses should have no problem complying with all
aspects of the law and those that don’t will find themselves in legal
jeopardy for significant penalties.
The process components of the law won’t be an issue for real businesses,
they don’t fake the reply address, they don’t hijack someone
else’s mail server nor do they contain falsified routing information.
Where they are likely to fail are in three specific areas.
1) Neglecting to include a valid physical address in the body of the email.
2) Not having a functional Internet-based opt-out mechanism, which must be
active for a minimum of 30 days after the email has been sent.
3) Failing to include clear and conspicuous identification that the message
is an advertisement or solicitation. Most State laws approached this similar
provision by requiring the use of the letters ADV: in the beginning of the
subject line. The Federal doesn’t specify how this is to be accomplished;
thereby, leaving it open to a wide range of interpretation.
There are several additional areas that are process related that may trip
up the sender unintentionally.
1) The sender rents or purchasing a defective email list, for example one
that has individuals that have already opted-out of email communications.
2) They use a ‘tricky’ subject line to entice recipients to open
the message. Subject lines that stretch the truth could be identified as
misleading the purpose of the email and therefore be a violation.
3) Agents or related 3rd parties that have business relationship with the
firm send out Spam. This could put the company in jeopardy if it can be proven
that they were aware of the related company’s activities.
Although the Federal law isn’t perfect one significant advantage it
does offer to real businesses is that there is now only one place they need
to go to check the rules before a company embarks onto an email marketing
program.
Violating Trust
Trust is one of the major stumbling blocks keeping the publics’ enthusiasm
for the Internet in check. And when it comes to providing their email address
that is in the eye of the storm. The overwhelming concern people have about
providing a company their email address is that it will be shared, loaned,
rented, sold or carelessly unprotected. Sharing lists internally between
product lines, departments, or divisions and externally with ‘business
partners’ stretches the permission basis originally given by the subscriber.
When opt-in lists developed at one website are resold to list brokers, real
businesses that rent these lists automatically become spammers because recipients
are typically applying this litmus test to commercial email they receive:
“Email marketing is for product/service information I’ve specifically
requested, Spam is sent without asking for it”.
Businesses embarking down the eMarketing path often have in-house databases
that include email addresses of suspects, prospects, and clients. The conversion
of these lists, developed on a relationship basis, to a formal subscriber
list treads a fine line and should be considered very carefully before assuming
that permission has been granted.
Lack of Value
Every time you send email to your list members, you will be judged, and in
some cases, it may appear to have been done unfairly. In today’s environment
subscribers are now becoming annoyed at a variety of shortcomings, such as
messages about products they seldom buy, messages that serve the sender more
than the recipient, unsubscribe processes that don’t work, ‘hard
sell’ messages or even messages in formats that can’t be properly
displayed in the recipient’s mail program.
The plain simple truth is that even in a permission email environment, recipients
are now applying their own tests for Spam whether they opted in or not. These
are natural human reactions to the mailings they receive – it can be
as straightforward as “Email marketing is email I like, Spam is email
I don’t like.”
How to Fix
Real businesses need to insure that they aren’t jeopardizing their brand
name by meeting or exceeding the best practices for email marketing. Auditing
the list, evaluating your content and insuring proper conformance with the
documentation process in the permission mailing process are the key components
to a successful campaign.
Copyright 2006 Internet Business Initiatives, LLC
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About The Author
Jerry Weinstock
In 1996 Jerry was one of the first to develop a for-profit HTML based e-mail
newsletter targeting a niche marketplace. At the height of the dot-com craze,
he sold a permission-based e-mail newsletter business
(AutoIdeas.com) for a niche
market for the rate of $33 per name – a rate that was previously
unthinkable. He regularly speaks on the subjects of e-mail marketing, technology
integration for small business and fighting spam to professional associations,
including marketing, security, and building construction associations, and
at technology industry trade shows. In 2002 Jerry became the first and ultimately
only Kansas resident to successfully file 12 lawsuits against bulk mailers
that spammed iBizInitiatives with unsolicited mail. To chronicle the successful
lawsuits and educate other people, he created the Web site –
KansasNoSpam.com
http://www.KansasNoSpam.com.
Learn more about our anti-spam efforts
http://www.ibizinitiatives.com/fightingspam.asp.
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