We found Mark Brownlow’s four part post so helpful that we’ve decided to do a series on it and give a quick overview of part two, The New Email Marketing: Live the R Word.  By "R word", Brownlow refers to relationships, and how building them, not just talking about them, is vital to successful email marketing.

The quality and value of service are what ultimately drive a company’s success.  Customer service must be rooted in a true willingness to please the customer in order to project sincerity and a genuine need for customer satisfaction.  Similarly, when relationships are the focus of email correspondence, the customer becomes engaged in a postive way.  Brownlow says, "If you truly value the email relationship with recipients, then that attitude pervades all your activities and lets you employ winning tactics you’d otherwise not think of.  Once you see recipients as people you want to keep happy and loyal, best practices fall out naturally." 

It is important to personalize emails based on the particular needs and attributes of the customer. Relationship based email lends itself to communication that is credible, relevant and trustworthy. Emails of substance will receive warmer and far more frequent responses from customers than the generic, sloppily-conceived messages they are used to receiving.  Brownlow offers several bits of advice for adding value to your emails from other industry professionals.

Brownlow’s full posting including links to the work of Wendy Roth, Aaron Smith and Anna Yeaman can be found at the URL below:

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2008/05/new-email-marketing-live-r-word.html

Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports recently posted an informative four part report entitled The New Email Marketing.  The blog outlines the problems experienced in the old school of email marketing and how enlightened marketers use email "successfully, sustainably, ethically and efficiently".  In the past, email marketers have been overly focused on the quantity of mail being sent and rarely addressed the relevance or quality of their campaigns.  Brownlow stresses a need for "smart email marketing and not bulk email marketing."

Reputable companies are beginning to realize the positive impacts of sending to a high quality list and reaching out to the right consumers in a meaningful way. They have abandoned the days of blindly spamming millions, hoping their sales would draw a parallel.  Deliverability has become tied directly to reputation, which is ultimately in the hands of that other consumer; the wrong consumer.  More harm than good comes of repeatedly sending offers to this annoyed recipient. Sending to people who don’t fit the mold for your offers not only affects your deliverability, but it reflects poorly on your brand as well. These connections may seem perfectly elementary and obvious, but one might ask, “How do I best perform quality control on my list and ultimately cement my brand’s trusted reputation?"  Marketers are finally getting the right idea about scaling back the bulk offers, but challenges lay ahead in streamlining email marketing.

Yahoo! has filed a lawsuit against an unknown group of defendants for allegedly posing as Yahoo to consumers.  In its filing, Yahoo claims the defendants sent mail telling consumers they had won prizes from a lottery organized by Yahoo!, which in fact linked them to a different party’s page asking for financial information.  Recipients of the "prizes" would fill in their information and be charged hundreds of dollars in processing fees by the website’s unknown creators.

Yahoo! is suing under the CAN-SPAM Act, federal trademark laws, and other state laws in the the U.S. District Court in New York City and is seeking unspecified damages and an end to the company’s practices.  Although the defendants are unknown at this point, Yahoo! hopes to indentify them through third party mailers during a discovery period.

Click here to view the full AP article:

news.yahoo.com: Yahoo Files Suit Against Lottery Spammers by The Associated Press

Lashback offers email brand monitoring with BrandAlert, which allows companies to see how their brand is being used or referenced in commercial e-mail.  With this data, companies are able to find out who is using their trademarked brandname to sell products and detect and research fraud and phishing schemes such as the one above. Enforce compliance of your brand rules, with your contracts and with all applicable laws today.

Rule 4:  Consumer’s Only Requirement for Opt-Out is His or Her Email Address and Opt-Out Preference.  No fees can be charged. No other information requested to authenticate or process opt-out. No login or other road block may be placed in the opt-out process other than sending a reply message or visiting a single unsubscribe landing page on website to deliver opted-out email address for Suppression.

This is the most significant, clear and far reaching concept for the entire set of new rules. The Commission is clearly stating the critical nature of Consumer Unsubscribe as a foundation of the CAN-SPAM Act. If you send a commercial email offer, all a consumer can be required to provide in order to opt out is their email address. This makes any obfuscation of the unsubscribe process a potential violation of federal law. This rule will be much talked about by the industry and seems to have the impact of codifying not only the existing "visible and operable" unsubscribe mechanism mandate, but also a simple, close to one click, unsubscribe process for consumers.

Implications are being discussed for unsubscribe landing pages which contain "best practice" global, as well as granular, opt-out choice menus for consumers, which if structured properly should continue as a legal best practice. Common practices like adding survey questions during unsubscribe should be audited to ensure they do not hinder the process and are not a requirement for the consumer to leave your list. Perhaps they are now better off on the opt-out confirmation page?

Authentication of Unsubscribe by requiring the consumer to include their name with the email address to be removed is also non-compliant based on the new rule. Avoid any action or process which makes your unsubscribe process anything but simple for consumers- whether web-based which is highly recommended as a best practice or as a reply-to email based mechanism, which seems to be degraded as a practice further by the new rule though it is still clearly compliant.

Rule 2: Establishes "Designated Sender" to Simplify Compliance for Multi-Advertiser Messages.

The intent of this rulemaking is to simplify compliance for a common sending scenario wherein multiple advertisers appear in commercial email. Before many companies would request their own physical address and opt-out mechanism appear with their Ad. This created a potentially confusing situation for consumers and complicated scenario for advertiser’s sharing suppression lists. The new rule enables marketers to designate one sender as responsible for compliance including being identified clearly in the From Line, Physical Address and Responsible for the entire Opt-Out process.

In this scenario, the rule also changes the definition of sender dropping language around "control of content" and "control of lists sent to" which did not necessarily align with how email campaigns are actually created among several advertisers. Look for more in depth follow-up guidance on this particular rule, as it is probably the most complicated of the new rules and based on feedback from the ESPC teleconference, seemed to generate the most new questions.

Rule 1:  A broad definition of the term "Person" is added beyond natural persons to include all business types and non-profits.

The Act contains many official definitions.  This addition adds one for the concept of "Person" to include the same definition used in the Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 CFR 310.2.  The term "person" would mean "an individual, group, unincorporated association, limited or general partnership, corporation, or other business entity."

A non-profit association specifically asked for exemption from CAN-SPAM, which political organizations enjoy. The Commission made clear that non-profits sending commercial email are not exempt from the CAN-SPAM Act.

The recently released FTC regulations on CAN-SPAM appeared in today’s Federal Register.  This means that the provisions of the final rule will go into effect July 7, 2008. 

Click here to view today’s Federal Register.

After years of inaction, it looks as if the Canadian government is finally getting close to passing its own anti-spam regulations.  Senator Yoine Goldstein introduced the Anti-Spam Act, which closely resembles Australia’s spam legislation.  The bill proposal comes after a recommendation from Canada’s 2005 National Task Force on Spam, which noted that Canada was fast becoming one of the only Western countries dropping the ball on spam regulations. The bill differs from the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act in two key ways: it bans unsolicited commercial e-mail, and it allows individuals private right of action against spammers.  However, since the bill is not government-sponsored, it may die in committee.  Regardless, Senator Goldstein’s bill may serve as a model for future legislative action in Canada.

For more insight into Canada’s proposed Anti-Spam Act, click the links below:

DirectMag.com: Canadian Anti-Spam Bill Introduced by Ken Magill

TheStar.com: Senator’s Anti-Spam Bill Is Welcome News by Michael Geist

Interactive marketing leader World Avenue announced on May 15th that it has settled charges with the Texas Attorney general, ending the civil investigation into its practices.  The investigation focused on the use of the word "free" in the company’s web advertisements.  The attorney general, after a thorough investigation into the company’s advertising practices, found that no rules or regulations had been violated.  World Avenue agreed to reimburse the Attorney General for its investigation costs and continue to develop best practices in online third party lead generation. 

Click to view World Avenue’s press release.

Related Articles:

DMNews: World Avenue Settles TX Charges by Cara Wood

Adotas: Texas AG Ends Investigation Into World Avenue by Kathleen