Inbox Marketer Newsletter

Best Practices in Strategic Email Marketing

September 2003

Execution
Don't forget Best Practices
By Geoff Linton

Why is privacy compliance in your corporate best interest? Consider some embarrassing slip-ups that have made the headlines recently:

The multinational drug company that sent a Viagra e-newsletter and mistakenly exhibited the entire mailing list in the “To:” line
The theft from ISM Canada of a computer hard drive containing the 700,000 customer records of a major insurance company.

In short, when things go wrong on privacy issues in the digital age, they can really go wrong. That’s why it’s not enough for marketers just to comply with PIPEDA; be mindful of Best Practices recommended by professional marketing associations as well.

A good example is email – PIPEDA doesn’t consider the email address to be non-sensitive information and therefore opt-out consent is fine. Practically speaking, using opt-out may not land you in jail but it could easily shut down your corporate Website. That’s because this particular aspect of privacy is rigidly self-policed by ISPs which already deal with volumes of spam complaints. In the email marketing world, if permission isn’t explicit and traceable, then it isn’t permission.

To make sure your privacy initiatives are up to date check in regularly at the Websites of some of the marketing associations, particularly the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA), and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). They tend to move faster than legislators!