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Respect isn't an option
In January, the Data Protection Act 1998 will have been in force for ten years (although passed in 1998, it didn’t become active until 1st January 2000). But a recent study of leading e-commece sites in the UK suggests that this law is observed more in breach than in compliance. Out of the UK’s 50 top sites, not one fully complies with the Information Commissioner’s Office best practice guidelines and the majority breach either the Act or the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR) 2003. Should we direct marketers care? Consent is vital What’s happening? Oh please! Let me ask you this: if I said to you, “can I have your email address so I can sell it to anyone?”, would you give it to me? Of course not, and neither would anyone else. And they’ve been making it tricky to find “unsubscribe” links. So, we have witnessed the weakening of the power of what, used properly, is arguably the best marketing tool ever created. Email mostly doesn’t work now (with a few noble exceptions). It doesn’t work because so many haven’t respected people’s preferences, rights under the law or plain common sense. What is the answer? But if you are renting email marketing lists, consider very carefully whether the vendor of that list genuinely has consent to pass it to you. If they do not, then it is highly likely that you will be damaging your brand. And if you are using your own list, consider an email validation campaign that is specifically designed to re-energise tired email addresses and eliminate those who are merely wasting your bandwidth. While your email volumes will fall, business from those emails will climb. http://www.data-strategy.co.uk/Main/Leader/Comment/Articles/02b5ec90cb3e423d95443eb3cc345a4e/Respect-isn%27t-an-option.html
Published: Oct 2009 in Data Strategy Magazine - Author: Tim Beadle, Atrium Group
Consider this – 56 per cent of consumers consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is “just not interesting to me” and 50 per cent consider “too frequent e-mails from companies I know” to be spam, according to a new study by Q Interactive conducted in conjunction with marketing research firm MarketingSherpa.
Desperate to get email addresses, some marketers have been playing “fast and loose” with gaining consent to email – often pre-ticking opt-in boxes or simply sending emails to any email address they get by any means. Yet more have been buying email addresses from so-called “opted-in” sources.
If you are using email as a marketing tool, first and foremost you have to consider it a consent-based medium. That means: a) genuinely seeking an “informed consent” in the first place; b) retaining that consent by only sending targeted emails that are highly likely to be of interest to the recipient; c) reccognising that “consent does not last forever” and if someone hasn’t opened or clicked on your emails after you’ve sent them 15 emails, then the chances of them responding on the 16th is zero.
Posted in:consent | data privacy | Data Protection Act | PECR 2003 | spam login or register to post comments
