Marketers should only send bulk commercial e-mail to recipients with whom they have a prior business or personal relationship, or when permission has been obtained. That’s one of the recommendations of the e-mail marketing guidelines released on Thursday by the Association for Interactive Marketing, a subsidiary of the Direct Marketing Association.
In the strongest and most detailed e-mail document produced by the DMA on e-mail, the guidelines spell out how that consent may be obtained. The document stops short of actually recommending that customers expressly opt in in every case, however, and defines affirmative consent in a broad sense that includes opt-out.
“Marketers who implement affirmative consent permission practices generally have higher response rates, lower complaint rates and blocking issues,” the document states.
A business relationship may be established by proven offline contact such as an application, purchase, request or transaction.
Affirmative consent, said the guidelines, includes double-opt-in, confirmed opt-in, opt-in, consent, opt-out. Marketers should inform recipients about the nature and the frequency of the e-mails they are to receive. “Marketers should consider sending all recipients a confirmation message,” the document said.
Other guidelines include that marketers should keep track of opt ins; keep their files clean, making use of all technology and services available to do so; prominently display their privacy policy; and make it easy to unsubscribe.
On the subject of content, the document advises marketers to use subject lines and content that accurately reflect the purpose of the message and to try to make the offer relevant to the recipient. The marketer should prominently display their brand in the subject line, too. And, marketers should provide their physical address.
“Marketers should make every effort to ensure delivery,” the document says. Best practices to that end include following “whitelisting” practices outlined by ISPs and e-mail gatekeepers; monitor open and clickthrough rates; immediately remove recipients whose message was kicked back through a hard bounce.
The document says that Marketers should develop a list hygiene policy that should deal with reply handling, the processing of remove requests, handling bounce backs and other issues.
Marketers, ISPs, list owners and e-mail service providers all share responsibility for informing consumers about anti-spam tools and techniques. Educational efforts might involve helping ISPs and consumers from falsely tagging legitimate e-mail as spam, said the guidelines.
Customer complaints are the joint responsibility of marketers, list owners and service bureaus, according to the document, and should be dealt with promptly and courteously.
The guidelines are a self-regulatory vehicle, providing recommendations to members, rather than requirements.
A separate document makes recommendations to members of the Council for Responsible E-mail, which developed the guidelines. It includes stricter guidelines such as the recommendation to inform customers what information was collected about them and how it will be treated before that data is used.
And, it says that members will not collect e-mail addresses through dictionary attacks or by harvesting e-mail. It also said member should not falsify the sender’s domain name, use open relay servers or use a non-responsive IP address.
