A way out
While double opt-in may please anti-spam advocates, it's not always the most desirable approach for all e-marketers, particularly those focused on promoting products using high volumes of e-mail.
E-mail marketing experts agree that using a confirmation process will slim down the list of e-mail recipients, as many choose not to respond, forget to confirm or get confused in the process. As a result, e-mail marketing organizations such as the Responsible Electronic Communications Alliance, or RECA, have suggested that, when dealing with internally developed lists, companies need only provide consumers with a way to opt out at the point of collection, commonly done with a prechecked box. A single opt-in, where recipients actively check a box or agree to receive e-mail, would be necessary only if the address might be shared with a third party, RECA says.
Hotwire, a discount travel site, has taken the opt-out approach, providing prechecked boxes in its site registration process for members to receive newsletters and information updates. The company has relied heavily on e-mail marketing since launching in October last year, using e-mail delivery services from Digital Impact, said John Hommeyer, chief marketing officer. Hommeyer said that, at least so far, Hotwire hasn't been labeled a spammer and, in fact, fewer than 1 percent unsubscribe after receiving e-mail offers from Hotwire.
"We ran through usability studies and did not have objections to it," Hommeyer said of the prechecked approach. "We want to get the most possible names and want to get [them] in a way people agree to."
More and more, though, companies wanting to put as much distance between themselves and the spammer label are moving away from the prechecked, or opt-out, method, experts say. Travel site Cheap Tickets Inc., of Honolulu, plans to switch to an active, single-opt-in approach when it launches a redesigned site this month. Since 1999, it has prechecked the boxes offering the option to receive e-mail communication, said Evans Gebhardt, vice president of marketing. About six months ago, the travel site decided to rethink its approach to build more trust with customers and because it's wasteful to market to uninterested customers, Gebhardt said.
In fact, many e-businesses are becoming more selective about whom they send e-mail marketing messages to. Consumers are most likely to start perceiving a company's marketing e-mail as spam when they get inundated with messages, particularly ones irrelevant to them, said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester.
Companies such as Hotwire and Cheap Tickets are trying to be selective about the volume of e-mail customers receive. Both have policies against sharing their e-mail lists with other companies or selling them to list brokers. Both also send a limited number of messages to customers. Hotwire sends a newsletter with updates once a month and e-mails about special fares in specific regions once every two weeks. Similarly, Cheap Tickets does two to three e-mail campaigns a month, targeting subscribers in 25 locations. The company also sends fewer messages to the least-active registrants, Gebhardt said.
"You have to be very disciplined," said David Moore, CEO of 24/7 Media Inc., of New York. "The tendency is to do whatever you have to do to make revenue numbers, but that becomes a short-term proposition because ultimately you lose the consumer."
Of course, even if you think you're doing all the right things, you can find yourself getting smeared with the spammer label. In such cases, as Motorola officials learned, it's important to act quickly to defend your good name. In Motorola's case, the company issued a press release in May about the lawsuit to make clear it wasn't the sender of the unsolicited e-mail messages. Since then, even with the lawsuit still pending, complaints from consumers have stopped. It saved face before the unfair label of spammer could stick.
