Your E-mail Preference Center Could Be Illegal
As a result of some Federal Trade Commission clarifications to the Can Spam act, many marketers’ unsubscribe processes could be breaking the law.
What’s more, previous to the FTC’s clarifications, the lawbreaking opt-out functions would have been considered best practices in the permission-based e-mail marketing industry.
The FTC ruled in May—among other things—that people cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps beyond sending a reply e-mail or visiting a single Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mails from a company.
Sounds simple enough.
However, according to Trevor Hughes, executive director of the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition, many marketers who use preference centers to enable subscribers to manage their accounts are now violating Can Spam.
The reason: Some require subscribers to go through more than one page. Also, others require users to give more information than their e-mail addresses, such as a password or reason for unsubscribing, to opt out.
The FTC’s opt out clarification “complicates things in that it demands simplicity when simplicity may not be the status quo,” said Hughes. “The two opt-out mechanisms that are permissible [under the law] as we understand it are a reply-based mechanism where you reply to the e-mail and write ‘opt-out’ in the subject line or body of the message, or alternatively, that you click through to a Web page [to opt out]. But it has to be a single Web page.”
As a result, he added, marketers are now restricted in what they can do during the opt-out process.
“You can’t authenticate, or require an e-mail or password, to get to the opt-out function,” he said. “You can’t put a [retention-offer] screen in front of the opt-out to try and do a save. You can offer it on the page, but you can’t do it on a screen in front of it.
“It’s got to be a single page, and that is not an ubiquitous practice in marketing,” he said. “There are a bunch of folks who do it on more than one page.”
Marketers are also prohibited from requiring any information—such as name and address, or reason for leaving—beyond the subscriber’s e-mail address to opt them out.
“You can’t require any data over and above what is necessary to process the opt out,” he said. “Now you can have nuance in the opt out, such as ‘opt me out of just this newsletter or all of your newsletters,’ but it can [require] no more than the e-mail address and the opt-out preference.”
Hughes’ advice: By all means, use an e-mail preference center and implement retention efforts during the opt-out process, but do it on a single page and require only the subscriber’s e-mail address in order to honor their request.
