Who Gets to Decide if it’s Spam? Not you, Mr Marketer

There is a growing sentiment in some business circles that spam can be clearly defined by what is and isn’t allowed under the typical anti-spam legislation enacted by governments these days.

In the US the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 (the acronym drawn from the bill’s full name “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing”) effectively legalized spam by applying three basic requirements to commercial emails:

• Visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism, with requests honored within 10 days
• Accurate content such as From: fields and subject lines, and includes a legitimate physical address of the advertiser
• Not sent via open relay, does not contain false headers, and is not sent to harvested email addresses

Some organizations have taken this legal standard and run with it, sending commercial email to addresses obtained through bought lists, co-registration, incentive offers, and other innocuous means such as when filling out forms or dropping business cards into prize draws at conferences.

And to comply with the unsubscribe requirements they use onerous mechanisms for unsubscribe requests instead of simple one-click methods.

And while doing all of this they insist that it’s not spam.  After all, the law says so.  It’s just perfectly legitimate email marketing.

You Don’t Get to Decide

I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide that.  And by “you” I mean businesses.  Businesses and their marketing departments who look at email as a fast, convenient way to reach a lot of people with their very important messages.

Now for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make some definitions clear.  I’m not talking about the kind of spam that botnets send out to try and trick people into buying fake pharmaceutical goods or a counterfeit watch.

I’m talking about UCE – unsolicited commercial email.  The kind of email you get when a company decides to add you to their marketing newsletter without you ever requesting it, and without a double opt-in process.  The law might say this isn’t spam, but every customer I talk to says it is.  And guess who gets to decide that?  The customer does.

Opt-In vs Opt-Out

In the world of email marketing there are two ways to building a mailing list.  In a recent blog post the Harvard Business Review sums these up nicely.

Responsible consumer marketers have adopted an “opt-in” e-mail policy for determining who receives their marketing messages. Unless customers give the marketer permission to contact them, the marketer leaves them alone.

There are two types of opt-in – single and double.  A single opt-in is when you provide your email address and are immediately subscribed.  A double opt-in is when you provide your email address, and then receive a confirmation message usually containing a link to click on to verify your request.

Single opt-in is open to abuse because you can be added to a list by someone else without your knowledge.  Double opt-in is the standard amongst ethical email marketers.  It is what 100% of customers tell me they prefer.

Opt-out on the other hand is the opposite.  And scarily the Harvard Business School blog makes the case for it.

Many B2B marketers abide by a similar policy, but they don’t have to — and shouldn’t. In fact, I’d argue, your business customers generally would prefer the reverse: an opt-out arrangement in which you send them messages unless they say “stop.”

See the problem here?  Combine opt-out email marketing with weak legislation like CAN-SPAM and businesses see how they can send you UCE and everyone should be happy about it.

Permission Marketing

The entire concept of opt-out flies in the face of permission marketing, the term coined by marketing guru Seth Godin.  For email marketing this basically means that the marketer won’t send you emails until you have given permission for them to do so.

Marketers need to pay close attention to the permission they are given before they decide what they will send to prospective customers.

The permission can be explicit (signing up to a newsletter), or implicit (providing an email address when downloading trial software).

The scope of implicit permission also changes depending on the situation.  A business card handed to a sales rep at a convention implies permission for personal communication from that sales rep.  It doesn’t imply permission to add the person to a global marketing list that receives all of the company’s marketing materials.

Listen to Customers

Your prospective customers are sending you indirect messages about how they view spam.

• Fighting spam is a multi-billion dollar a year industry
• Nobody complains they aren’t receiving enough email
• Everybody complains when they receive something that annoys them
• Anti-spam vendors and ISPs offer no deliverability assistance to email service providers who do not require double opt-in

Customers have decided what spam is and an eco-system of ISPs, ESPs, and anti-spam vendors works every day to support them.

Listen to your customers, and don’t think you get to define what is and isn’t spam.