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.
Financial penalties
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.
Purchasing contact lists
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.
The Privacy 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).
Harvesting
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 Spam Act Rules
The following three steps explain the main requirements of the Spam Act 2003.
Step 1 – Consent
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.
Step 2 – Identify
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.
Step 3 – Unsubscribe
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
