The hard part
Enabling the opt-out option is the easy part, though, compared with determining how to sign up customers to receive marketing e-mail. Obtaining some sort of permission is required if a company wants to escape the label of spam, say marketing experts and anti-spam advocates. How much permission is necessary, though, is being debated and leads to the biggest ambiguity in the definition of what is and what is not spam.
Those wanting to be on the safest side will use a double-opt-in process, also called confirmed opt-in, experts say. Under this approach, not only will potential recipients have to actively ask to receive e-mail by, for example, checking boxes in an online registration form, but they also will receive a confirmation e-mail that requires them to reply or click a link to verify their choice.
"The easiest way to avoid [spam] is to go on a pure confirmed opt-in basis; otherwise, you are playing roulette with every e-mail you send," said Ray Everett-Church, board member and legal counsel for The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
Using double opt-in will cover the toughest requirements of spam laws and also avoid the possibility of mail bombing, where someone signs someone else up for e-mail. Following the process also puts companies in good stead with network watchdog MAPS, which defines spam as commercial e-mail sent without prior permission and verification of the e-mail addresses. If MAPS gets complaints about a specific domain sending spam, it judges a company against that standard. If it fails, the company's offending IP addresses can end up on what MAPS calls the Realtime Blackhole List and be blocked not only from the MAPS network but also from the networks of majors ISPs and other companies that subscribe to the list.
The result could be devastating for companies that rely on e-mail for reaching customers or prospects, as Harris Interactive learned in July last year when it was placedâ€"unfairly, it claimsâ€"on the MAPS RBL. E-mail was blocked to about 2.7 million of the 6.6 million members who participate in Harris' online market research polls conducted through e-mail. The blacklisting led to blocking from such ISPs as AOL and Microsoft's Microsoft Network and Hotmail. And all of that happened even though Harris gathered its list of e-mail panelists by using an opt-in process through partner Web sites in which panelists actively selected to participate and were able to opt out in subsequent e-mail, said Harris CEO Gordon Black. But MAPSâ€"and some of the ISPs using the RBLâ€"demanded double opt-in.
Harris in late July last year filed a lawsuit against MAPS and several ISPs seeking an injunction against the blocking and damages. It also began negotiating with the ISPs and by mid-September dropped the lawsuit once individual ISPs allowed 98 percent of its e-mail to pass through.
"If we had not been able to get unblocked from Microsoft and AOL, it would have shut us down," Black said. "What it ended up being was an annoyance."
The blacklisting, which Black said interfered with the company's ability to conduct effective polls and cost it some business, also led the company to re-evaluate how it gathers its e-mail panel. It eventually adopted the double-opt-in approach. Harris found that double opt-in allowed it to identify the most-motivated participants.
In fact, with double opt-in, four to five times more recipients responded to surveys. Those higher response rates, and the fact that the respondents from double opt-in offered more-extensive answers to survey questions, did the most to motivate Harris to announce last month that it had begun switching its entire e-mail poll list to double opt-in. At the same time, Harris was beginning a push to add more international participants to its panel and negotiating with new sites and sources of potential panelists, Black said.
"Quite honestly, it doesn't do me any good to mail people who don't respond," Black said. "It's really better to get a higher response."
The switch also satisfied MAPS, which late last month removed Harris from its RBL about a year after first blocking the company.
