Head of 3dinteractive’s Jaysen Du Plessis recently spoke with Marketing Magazine about why mobile brand executions need to have more of a personal connectivity to their audience than any other medium.
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Our Head of The Performance Network & Great Sites products, Jaysen Du Plessis recently caught up with Power Retail to speak about a current hot topic – SPAM.
When it comes to emailing customers and potential customers, it would seem some of Australia’s largest companies are still struggling with what is considered acceptable.
Even though the Spam Act has been around since 2003 there is still uncertainty about the implications of spamming as well as what is required from an advertiser so as not to be labelled as sending spam.
Don’t think that because you don’t send out thousands of e-mails that the law doesn’t apply to you; a single message may be spam, the message does not need to be sent in bulk.
Under Australia’s Spam Act of 2003, it is illegal for Australian companies to send unsolicited electronic commercial communication (including email, SMS, MMS, and instant messages).
The Act is enforced by the Australian Communications and Media Authority(ACMA) who will investigate and issue warnings to companies in breach of the Act, who they may choose to prosecute.
A business that is found to be in breach of the Spam Act may be subject to a penalty of up to $220,000 for a single day’s violation. If, after that finding, the business violates the same clause, they may be subject to a penalty of up to $1.1 million.
You may use a purchased or rented list of contacts, but you should be careful to ensure that the requirements of the Spam Act have been met by the company you are working with.
When dealing with a company ask them to go through the sign up process and you will quickly be able to pick up if a recipient has opted in to receive communication from you. You should also ensure the contract you have in place ensures the list supplier agrees to adhere to the Spam Act.
Equally importantly to complying with the Spam Act, businesses should make sure that their practices are in accordance with the National Privacy Principles in all activities dealing with personal information including contact details (the policy can be accessed atwww.privacy.gov.au).
Businesses must not use lists which have been generated using software scans for web harvesting email addresses, for the purpose of sending commercial electronic messages. If you are sending your advertisement out to a third party email list you can ask the list provider for a sample of the data. If there are a couple of email addresses listed as ‘support@…..’, ‘info@…’, ’sales@….’, this is an indication that the list provider is harvesting from the web.
The following three steps explain the main requirements of the Spam Act 2003.
Your business messages should only be sent to people who have given you consent. This is a direct indication that it is okay to send the message and normally done when a user clicks the subscribe box on your website indicating that they would like to hear from you.
It is also possible to infer consent based on a business or other relationship with the person, for instance you order products from a company every month and you are moving – you are allowed to send them a notice letting them know that you are moving offices owing to the business relationship you have.
Your commercial messages should always contain clear and accurate identification of who is responsible for sending the message, and how the sender can be contacted. It is important for people to know who is contacting them, and how they can get in touch with the sender. This will generally be the organisation that authorises the sending of the message, rather than the name of the person who actually hits the ‘send’ button.
Identification details that are provided must be accurate for a period of 30 days after the message is sent. This should be taken into consideration if the business is about to change address.
All commercial electronic messages must contain a functional unsubscribe facility, allowing people to opt-out from receiving future messages. The Spam Act specifies that the person’s consent has been withdrawn within five working days from the date that the unsubscribe requestwas sent (in the case of electronic unsubscribe messages) or delivered (in the case of unsubscribe messages sent by post or other means).
Any commercial electronic message sent after this five day period contrary to an unsubscribe request may be considered to be in breach of the legislation. The unsubscribe facility must remain accurate and functional for a 30 day period. You should ensure that your unsubscribe facilities and business processes are set up to support this requirement. Options for doing this could be:
Setting up a same-day unsubscribe regime, so that opt-out requests have a 24 hour turn around; or
Change your process for sending out electronic messages so that the addresses that have unsubscribed are always removed from your contact list, just before any messages are sent.
You also should consider keeping unsubscribe requests for a specified period in order to check addresses against future message mail-outs.
By Jaysen Du Plessis, Head of The Performance Network & Great Sites
read Jaysen’s article on Power Retail
Marketing Mag recently spoke to Jaysen Du Plessis, Head of Great Sites (our exclusive membership portal partner) about trends in email marketing and how marketers are no longer just competing with other businesses by pushing their agendas via email, but also through strategic social media campaigns.
So, if email is still your marketing tool of choice, take some time to make sure you’re sending out the most effective emails possible by following Jaysen’s advice below:
It’s easy to quickly add a subject line without giving it the thought and attention it deserves. All the work that you have put into the entire email will be worth nothing if you can’t get people to open up the email in the first place. Make your subject interesting and relevant and don’t hesitate to try a few different options to see what gives you the best open rate.
This will vary depending on who you are targeting and what you are trying to promote but a little testing will reveal when the best time for you to reach your audience is.
If you are trying to reach business recipients, avoid sending emails first thing in the morning; try sending it after they would have deleted all their early morning spam. If you are promoting a weekend event, emailing on Thursday is generally going to be more effective than emailing on a Monday.
Blocked images are the bane of every email campaign. If you have chosen to use text embedded into a large image for your campaign, and then this image is blocked, your click through rate is going to be very low!
Images may be blocked for the following reasons
eg Gmail and Windows Live Mail
It’s best to design emails that work equally well with images on or off by using normal text as part of your email creative and ensuring this appears above the fold and within a typical outlook preview window.
It is also worth placing a line at the top of your email that asks recipients to add your email address to their address book. Include this message in your opt-in confirmation and in all welcome emails. Another important link to have in an email is to an online version of the email if it cannot be displayed in the email client.
List fatigue can occur when you’re sending your campaigns too frequently and a list becomes tired of hearing from you. The answer is simply to send emails a little less often and with messages that are targeted to the audience.
You don’t have to stop marketing or sending emails, you can simply use different databases to send your message to.
People get so much email on a daily basis, so why should they read yours? People want timely, compelling, and useful content. If they don’t get it, they’ll hit delete. Ascertain what the objective of your email is and keep it in mind so that the email focuses on one single objective – then get the user to click and be taken to your website with a relevant offer.
Avoid making your email too cluttered and confusing and you’ll have a better chance of getting the click throughs you’re after. The objective of most emails is to drive sales revenue, which means the email has one solitary function –guide the email recipient to the website. Once they have landed on the site, it is then the site objective to entice them to buy.
So your message is targeted and valid and you can’t understand why your emails are being caught up in spam filters. It’s important to keep these filters in mind when writing your email content as many email newsletter platforms can check your content against various spam criteria. This means you will need to alter your email content if required. Check your email software for your spam rating (different software have different rating systems).
A good tip is to avoid too many capital letters, exclamation marks and spammy phrases like ‘GET IN QUICK’ ‘MAKE MONEY TODAY’.
Top words and symbols to avoid are $,!, %, Win, Free, Cash, Amazing, Discount, Winner.
Fast facts on what makes a good email
Take a look at Jaysen’s Marketing Mag article here
