eMarketing - Hurdles to Jump

"Let's run an eMarketing campaign. It's cheap to do, it's easy to send, and we can run it globally. Get me a data pull of all our records with an email address, and buy me in a whole load more from all the list sources you can find that look relevant."

Ah, would it were that simple. But find me a Chief Marketing Officer who hasn't said it, or a wet behind the ears marketer who hasn't suggested it. And then find me the very few who haven't made absolute fools of themselves.

This article is about the basics, the hurdles, the things that, if done right, prevent idiocy. And, surprisingly, all is common sense, and remarkably little has to do with the laws. But let's cover those almost at once. First a definition:

What is eMarketing
It is the sending, by electronic means, an electronic communication designed to move someone onto or along the purchasing route for your products or services.

Mechanisms include:

• Email
• SMS (text) messages
• MMS (SMS's bigger brother)
• Fax
• Voicemail
• Bluetooth transmission

Of these, currently, only Bluetooth transmission is not bound by the laws in the section below.

eMarketing also includes advertising designed to drive people to a web landing page or microsite, but that is outside the scope of this article, which deals with transmitted mechanisms directly to the person. That also excludes Bluetooth transmission from the article, since this is untargeted, although personally received.

Disparity in laws

The world is not a simple, cohesive whole. In some countries there are laws prohibiting unsolicited commercial electronic communication, we'll call it spam, and in others there aren't. Where laws exist neighbouring nations, even nations who are members of entities like the European Community, have different laws.

In the EC there is "Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.." We're concerned with the totality of that one. And there's "Directive 2002/58/ec of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 July 2002 concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector (Directive on privacy and electronic communications)." We're concerned with Article 13 of that one.

In Europe, of course, we aren't a federation of states. We're real, individual, independently governed, sovereign states. So even in the EC we've all implemented those directives with subtle or major differences. In the rest of the world there are myriad other laws. Everyone's heard of the CAN Spam act, of course they have. Not that many know what it means, or does or how swingeing its powers are. And it's not the role of a marketing department to know precisely what these laws do. They just aren't legally trained.

For the first time in history, partnerships between legal counsel and marketing are required if the absolute letter of the law is to be adhered to in every nation. But, with common sense, even a junior marketer can avoid all the pitfalls, even in Spain where the privacy laws have enormous fines.

The first way to make sure you are lawful is to have reputable data.

Reputable data

Our own data
"We've gathered our data carefully over the years. It's of excellent quality."

I doubt that very much. I doubt both the integrity of your data and the permissions you have stored to be able to know whether you can market to it at all. And, even of you have stored permissions, at least half the data universe as a field called "Marketing" with values "0" or "1". Who really knows, now the data management team's changed personnel four times, what a "1" means. Does it mean "Yes, market to this record" or "No, don't market to it?" And worse, what if sometimes it means yes and other times, depending on the clerk who entered the data it means no.

When was the last time you validated this data? According to Gartner, in the IT world, the Chief Information Officer has an average tenure of 23 months. Figures for Chief Marketing Officers are even shorter at 14 months. It doesn't take advanced mathematics to work out the data decay rates of carefully gathered data.

If only you'd meant "carefully husbanded" instead of "carefully gathered"

Rented or bought data
"We rent lists. They have to be up to date"

A good number of lists are up to date. But some lists must not be touched with a bargepole. First, look at your contract. If it doesn't specify that you require data that is guaranteed to be suitable for marketing purposes, and if the list vendor will not guarantee this, walk away very fast indeed.

If the list vendor compiles their own email address list, ask yourself; "Has anyone ever asked me if they may have my email address in order to make money by selling it to any third party who wants to sent me spam?" If they asked, would you say "yes"?

In general, and there are exceptions, but in general, a list vendor who self compiles an email marketing list should just not be trusted. In Germany such lists are almost universally unavailable. The Germans take the laws very seriously.

There are good lists available. These tend to be:

• Trade associations - members know the association will make money form the lists and are generally content with such use. It keeps subscriptions down
• Commercial publications - their distribution lists are like gold dust. Generally they do not rent the list itself, but rent right to have them use the list on your behalf.
  

Even so, make sure your contract is explicit and that the records used have permission for you to use them for the campaign. And be careful if the list owner allows you to have the data yourself. I have one of my private email addresses on a commercial list being sold for marketing purposes and I have never, and will never, give permission for that use for that address.

Desire to receive
No-one wants to receive spam. Even those of us who are untroubled by junk mail hate spam. And we hate SMS spam more than we hate email spam. We hate fax spam less because it is sent less. We think Voicemail spam is beyond the pale.

We just don't want it.

We don't are how many hours it took to craft your unique and wonderful message. We hate you because you are a spammer. And because you are a spammer we will take steps against you. You need to understand what we can do to you. That's covered in outline in the Blacklisting / Blocklisting section.

Your job is to get our approval to have you appear in our inboxes. That means you need a persuasive reason to get that permission. You need to create, by good quality marketing, our desire to receive your material and, much more important than that, to value it, and this to value you. That's even before you ask us to respond to your call to action! Calls to action are a totally separate matter, and out of scope here.

Moral high ground
Of course, certainly in the UK, where the interpretation into law of Directive 2002/58/EC is just plain weird, you may, lawfully, send unsolicited commercial electronic communications - that's spam, remember - to anyone who is not, for example:

• An individual subscriber
• A partnership, except in Scotland
• A sole trader, whether by name or by business name

That means that, in the UK, you can lawfully spam the bejasus out of loads of corporate email addresses. Of course that is not true in Germany (etc)

How do you feel about sorting your database into partnerships (except in Scotland) and partnerships (Scottish), about deciding if a hotmail address is business or private, and whether Jones & Sons, the plumber, is a sole trader?

You have no chance of doing this at all. So don't even try. Instead the moral high ground is there for the taking. "We only send marketing materials electronically to people who have said expressly that they wish us to do so."

This reduces, at a stroke, two things:

• Risk
• Size of your marketing database

Both of these are good things, but the second feels bad at first.

Your challenge is to refill the people who would never give you permission even if the four postmen of the apocalypse were threatening them, with people who want to hear from you. Those are the people you want - the willing, the happy. Then graphs are a little old, but were released into the public domain at a Privacy laws and Business conference by PeopleSoft to show the transition from pre permission to post permission. Comparing [Sales] Inquiries by region for 2003 and 2004 it is self evident that the number fell considerably. From these graphs alone we can start to say "This was a marketing disaster. What happened?"

What happened was the transition from shotgun eMarketing to Permission Based eMarketing:



The figures' apparent disastrous look and feel were offset at once by the graph of license revenue. The graph should also be looked at in the context of PeopleSoft being subject to rumour, speculation and a hostile takeover by Oracle. And even with all that uncertainty:



The message is abundantly clear. Take the moral high ground and not only does Return on Marketing Investment rise, overall business yield rises as well. But you have to get it right. While it isn't rocket science, it requires huge attention to detail.

Blacklisting / Blocklisting
Revenge is sweet. Spam is easily identifiable, and the source is identifiable. That source has IP addresses, and those IP addresses are used by corporations like yours for their email servers, their web servers. Those IP addresses are the telephone numbers of the internet.

Let's assume your email server has had spam reports against it. Those reports to go official businesses and unofficial vigilante groups. Different people take different actions. I'll use SPEWS (now defunct, thank heavens, but I am treating it as though it were currently operating) to illustrate what can happen.

• Your IP address itself is blocklisted. That's "block", not "black". Blocklisting means that people using the SPEWS blocklist will not bother to receive email sent by your IP address. Your email is not going to get through, spam, real, personal, nothing.
• Your Internet Service Provider will be told, quietly, about the block

So far so good. It's a bit draconian to block you, but it's probably fair. You have been reported as a spammer, so you probably deserve it (0.8 probability)

• If your ISP takes no action, the IP addresses surrounding yours will be blocklisted. These may be yours or someone else's. SPEWS doesn't care.
  
• SPEWS may take investigative action to find out other IP address ranges you use, and will start to block those, too.

At this point other people, people who are nothing to do with your business, but whose IP addresses are blocked because of you, may start to notice. Mostly they don't.

• As time passes without your ISP taking action, more and more IP addresses will be blocked. Now their business is starting to suffer because of you. The only acceptable outcome for SPEWS is the prevention by the ISP of your spamming. This generally means removal of your servers from their business.

If you have adopted Permission Based Marketing then you have a defence.

How high were those hurdles?
With good, properly husbanded, properly rented data, eMarketing is not only lawful globally, it is welcomed, provided you take the moral high ground of Permission Based Marketing, and stick to it.

The hurdles to jump are those of common sense. There is nothing in the law to be afraid of provided common sense is applied at all stages of the campaign. They aren't high hurdles, but they're important hurdles, vital hurdles. No-one wins a hurdle race by knocking any hurdle flat

eMarketing campaigns are good for business, when done right. Just look how PeopleSoft prospered at the most inauspicious time in their history as an independent corporation. They did it right.