By Erin Joyce
Creating the e-mail marketing equivalent of the “Good Housekeeping” seal of
approval is about more than building “best practices” in a developing
industry, e-mail marketing officials say.
The new “Trusted Sender” seal, a beta program launched by privacy advocacy
groups and marketing companies this week, should help opt-in marketers get
their e-mail messages through instead of being filtered out with the rest of
the spammers.
“Consumers are getting much more sophisticated with filtering programs,”
agrees Al DiGuido, chief executive officer of Bigfoot Interactive, a New York-based e-mail marketing firm. “This seal is going to be very obvious to the reader that there’s a level of approval” from marketers and the industry
that the message was formed under best practices.
The “Trusted Sender” program, announced Thursday, is a brainchild of non-profit privacy group TRUSTe and privacy
consulting firm ePrivacy Group designed to help build best practices into
e-mail marketing and, hopefully, lift consumer confidence in commercial
e-mail.
Microsoft, DoubleClick and e-mail firm Topica are working on the beta test
for the “Trusted Sender” seal program. Direct response marketing companies
such as Bigfoot Interactive, RappCollins Innovyx, E-Dialog, Enterprise
Marketing Solutions Inc. and Virtumundo have thrown their support behind the
program.
In order to gain the “Trusted Sender” seal of approval in the top right hand corner of the message, the e-mails have to
follow guidelines that start with the basics, such as deploying fair
information practices that clearly identify who the sender of the e-mail is.
Subject lines have to be genuine, too, and must accurately reflect the
content
of the e-mail. Every e-mail must include options for the reader to opt-out of
further commercial e-mails.
Importantly for the online marketing industry, TRUSTe’s best practices
highlight the use of e-mail addresses for consumers with whom a company has
a prior business relationship — such as a sale. The rules do not apply to
rented lists or shared databases.
“I’m all for separating the good guys from the bad guys,” says Richard
Baumer, president and CEO of New York-based direct response marketing firm
Venture Direct. “So I’m in favor of a seal of approval.”
But he also cautions that some aspects of the guidelines get into fuzzy
areas, such as the subject line rule. That’s a critical area for e-mail
marketers, he says, and it’s also a creative decision.
“The anti-spam initiatives have their heart in the right place” by boosting
best practices among direct marketers, Baumer says. “But there are a lot
of gray areas” on subject lines that could be subjective to those who anoint
the seal of approval.
Christine Duffney, spokesperson for the Direct Marketing Association, which
supports the seal program, says the association is all for anything that
helps build more consumer trust in the marketplace, especially e-mail
marketing.
While she agreed there might be some question about how to enforce the rule
about the subject line matching the content, she says at least we could see
fewer subject lines about “an order confirmation when we have never ordered
anything” from the sender.
The “Trusted Sender” program arrives as the Federal Trade Commission and other
industry groups gathered for the 2nd Annual Privacy and Data Security Summit in Washington, D.C., and ramped up their fight against spammers.
The DMA, for example, has a new set of e-mail marketing policies that are
required of its 5,000-plus members. The guidelines are coming out on Monday,
which happens to be during National Consumer Protection Week.
Duffney says the rules include tightened guidelines on how direct e-mail
marketers
can state what they are selling and how they share, rent or sell consumers’
e-mail address to third parties.
Like the “Trusted Sender” program, the DMA guidelines say the senders must
clearly identify themselves in the return address, and must include opt-out
information in the e-mail.
The FTC is also planning to unveil its latest war on spammers, and what’s
expected to be a bigger crackdown on spammers who use fake e-mail return
addresses.
“We’re very strident about the whole issue of privacy” in the e-mail
marketing industry, adds Bigfoot’s DiGuido. “The spammers are going to die
under their own weight of the fact that consumers” are getting more
sophisticated about deleting them.
Christopher Saunders contributed to this story.
