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Consent

Continuing on from my Part 1 overview I’m taking a quick look at the first part of particular interest to the Australian Government. Consent. I’m drawing heavily on the Spam Act 2003 – A practical guide for business and hopefully condensing it down so it all makes sense for you. So ‘Consent’. What is it, how does it work, and how does it apply to you today?

Consent comes in two forms (yes, you get an extra one free of charge). EXPRESS, or INFERRED. What are these, and are you operating within them?

Express Consent

Express consent is where you have received direct indication that it’s permissible to send commercial electronic messages to the recipient. Examples as provided by the guide include:

• the addressee has subscribed to your electronic advertising mailing list
• the addressee has deliberately ticked a box consenting to receive messages or advertisements from you
• the addressee has specifically requested such material from you over the telephone

This is all pretty obvious stuff, I personally find it interesting that there is no time-frame proviso where publics must re-opt in periodically. Often client email lists are years old and as more corporations move into email-delivery I wonder if this will become a consideration. Anyway, we find typical unsubscription messages are “I don’t remember providing my email address”.
Also what happens if a parent company has several sub-brands which also wish to correspond to recipients who have opted into the company ‘chain’ at some point? Certainly many questions and as we move along to ‘inferred consent’ you might find some answers.

Inferred Consent

Inferred consent is predicated on the key phrase ‘reasonable expectation’ and gives grounds for corresponding directly with a public who has not specifically ticked that little checkbox on your website saying they want to receive an email from you. This is fair enough, it’s not like when you walk into a car dealership and are asked to fill out a form allowing the salesman to talk to you. So how does this work practically?

• Email address has been provided in the general expectation of follow up communication or used in day to day transactional correspondence. The provision of a business card in the expectation of communication relating to corresponding business activities.
• Online product registration/warranties
• When an addressee has conspicuously published their email address, if the correspondence relates to their published business activity. The example provided, is emailing a plumber about the sale of plumbing supplies, but not cheap pharmaceuticals. Or about their inheritance in Nigeria. In an interesting aside in the SPAM Act overview, if the potential recipient has ‘No Spam’ or words to that effect published with their email it can correspondingly be ‘inferred’ that they do not wish to receive a message.

But wait.. there is another avenue worth remembering. Inferred consent can be established on the basis of an ‘existing relationship’, as long as it is ‘consistent with the expectations of the addressee and their conduct’. (Spam Act 2003 – A practical guide for business: 8). This is of course slightly subjective, but again, common sense prevails. Some examples.

• persons who have purchased goods or services which involves ongoing warranty and service provisions
• registered users of online services
• subscribers to information/advisory services
• financial members of a club
• professional association members
• members of frequent flyer or buyer clubs
• employers and employees
• contractors

An ‘existing relationship’ cannot be inferred in the case of once-off purchases, such as a T-Shirt or event attendance for example. There’s more examples provided by the government, but I’m sure it’s clear where this is headed and if you’re concerned about your list, feel free to research on the government’s website or contact us and we’ll help you as much as we can!

As more and more of you transition from traditional direct marketing to an online relationship, I’m sure many have older lists which you may be unsure how to deal with in confidence. One thing that’s good is that it doesn’t matter when or how the list has been used. It’s up to you however to ascertain whether each addressee satisfies either the Express or Inferred consent requirements.

It then becomes your responsibility to ensure you seek consent from your publics to send them ‘commercial electronic messages’.

‘I’m still not sure if I have been provided with that consent’! Yes some of us are definitely in this category. Here we would recommend you follow them up to see if you can send them commercial electronic messages. I think this is good relationship management and will show you to be conscientious and take your public’s privacy and personal information seriously. Only good can come of this, even if it’s a little counter intuitive. But it’s not, if you think about it.

Best practice and double opt-ins

It’s interesting to see that out trusty Government also recommends the use of double-opt-in list, where the user’s email is submitted, or added to a list. They then receive an email asking them to confirm their ‘opting in’. Standard practices dictates that after perhaps 14 days, either they have confirmed their addition by responding positively to the confirmation email, or a negative or non-response ensures they are not included. We facilitate this practice with our Mailbox software and are happy to implement it for you if you desire.

Can I use addresses out of a industry index?

While the use of email harvesting software for the purposes of sending unsolicited commercial electronic messages is prohibited, lists generated manually (even from viewing websites) are not. Again, be aware of the ‘no spam’ disclaimers you may find.
Same goes for purchased contact lists, fine to use them, but be careful to make sure the requirements of the Spam Act have been met (consent has been gained).

We spend a lot of time advising on best practice for our many clients who use our email marketing services, but for those of us in Australia, we happen to be the beneficiaries of some of the most progressive (and strict!) spam legislation in the world, so it’s worth getting to know and ensuring that your campaigns are conforming with some reasonable rules.

Please note I am NOT a lawyer and my writings do not constitute legal counsel of any kind. But hopefully I can present some good information and links to relevant law to help you in formulating your companies SPAM policy. There’s a lot to digest, so I’m going to break it down into this introduction and three bite-size chunks for you to get your heads around over the next month or so.

Now if you’re feeling keen, the Australian government has produced a helpful document called “Spam Act 2003: A Practical Guide for Business”. It’s an invigorating read and if you want to dig deeper it’s a good place to start. However, I’ve read it, chewed it, thought about it and have emerged victorious. So let’s start at the bottom, what is ‘SPAM’ according to the Aussie pollies?

According to the SPAM Act, SPAM is, ‘unsolicited commercial electronic messaging’, and can be a single message sent via Instant Messaging (IM), SMS, other mobile phone messaging (MMS for example) or email. What isn’t covered is non-electronic matter, voice phone calls, pop up windows (sadly) and ‘Messages without any commercial content that do not contain links or directions to a commercial website or location’ (Spam Act 2003: A Practical Guide for Business: 4). For the messages to covered by the law they must either a) originate in Australia or b) contain and Australian link.

Address harvesting software or addresses gained from this type of software must also never be
used. Ever. Ever Ever Ever.

Some of the penalties which might interested you are: A single day of contraventions of the law can result in a fine of $220 000 and multiple breaches can lead to exposure to 1.1 million of fines. So if you’re planning on being caught you better have extra close ties to the Nigerian government and the hidden money of which you are the only beneficiary.

Back to business, how does one work to ensure complicity and avoid legal action and ensure your sending facility isn’t blacklisted through poor practice? There are three primary areas where a business needs to take care and I’m going to give a brief overview as best I can. Again, I recommend taking a look at the government’s document and also other relevant information on the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s website. The three areas are:

1. Consent
2. Identify
3. Unsubscribe

We’re going to look at each of these in a little more detail in the coming days, but so that I can leave you with something practical here are two quick points on what a message must contain by law.

1. Accurate information about the sender of the message
2. A functional way for the message’s recipients to indicate that they do not wish to receive such messages in the future – that they wish to unsubscribe.

So, easy. If know your list is clean and not sure about what actually has to be in the email to satisfy your legal requirements, just make sure you have accurate and legitimate contact information regarding your business and a way for the recipient to opt out. Easy! But don’t get too excited about your awesome fulfillment of these two simple directives, we’ve got the big three areas in SPAM law to come. Stay tuned!

~Rob :)

Bad publicity can be hard to overcome - especially if your business relies on reputation for 50% of its income.

In December 2007, Kangaroo Island had some pretty horrible publicity: widespread fires on the island (and media coverage to equal the fires). Now that the fires are out - so too are the tourists. The ABC reports that tourist bookings have dropped dramatically. With the economy of the island being 50% tourism this is a big issue - so is the reliance of the summer period to sustain through the winter down period. Hard times may be ahead for some.

The usual response to this kind of publicity is to communicate your story with the public. With more and more people researching online, your website is an important place to make sure this happens. Kangaroo Island promoters have indeed done this. The ‘official’ Kangaroo Island website have put a notice on their front page:

‘Coming to KI and concerned about the fires? Don’t be. Download K.I OK Map here (PDF 467KB)‘

Download the pdf and you’ll see a well prepared map with fire damaged areas highlighted and the reassurance that everything is ‘OK’. I think this is a good thing - checking the site for up to date news was the first thing I did when I heard about the fires. However I think there are a few things that could be done here to maximise the effect of the communication efforts:

1. Make sure it’s widely visible. One link on the front page is not enough - people will enter the website in other ways and may still have this issue in mind. Under the menu is an appropriate place to insert a site wide link/text/graphic.
2. Combine the power of the Internet. Ozone Hotel is a website of a business on the island yet there is nothing addressing the issue there. Ensure that as many other businesses are on board with you promoting your good news. A simple link on other websites promotes both the freshness and unity of all businesses involved. Both are important in helping people make a decision on travel.
3. Show the reality. I don’t see how showing people what they will get is a bad thing. If people go to the island not knowing there have been fires they may be disappointed. If they expect everything to be they may be disappointed.
4. Tell stories. Allow the personality and people of the island to tell a positive story. A personal response can communicate a greater deal of trust, and persuade those who doubt that the island is still a great place to go. This is done to a degree on the pdf download - where a ‘personal’ appeal is made, I believe a widening of this idea could help.

In the end - bad publicity is still going to affect the island and people may have their minds made up without even looking at Kangaroo Island related websites. However there are those who can still make up their minds. Don’t let them make their minds up without hearing your side of the story - ensure they can hear it. When/If this happens to your business - the important thing to do is to use the news. Be loud and clear and let people hear your side of the story.

Our ad was “clicked out” within 2 hrs of starting the campaign. So much for free ads on Facebook!

The Last few days

Over the last five or so days we have continued to monitor the ad (you can see it to the right). From the start we had our budget set at $5/day - that stayed the same throughout. However each day we gradually lowered the budget of our price per click from the begining $1 per click to now around $0.30 per click. Each time the ad was clicked out within a couple of hours of it starting again. We were disappointed to say the least - that our ad was so ‘popular’. We were really hoping to have a fair amount of time between the ads being displayed and the ad budget being filled. Anyway let’s get to the results.

• Each day we reduced our budget, our ad had a higher number of clicks;
• Our click through rate was between .05% and .02%;
• On average, the ad had 48931 impressions per day. The highest being 74976, the lowest being 22578.
• The average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) was between $0.22 and $0.08

For the purposes of testing how you might get thousands of impressions without many clicks - this might seem like an okay result. The lowest click through rate (CTR) was 0.02% - virtually no clicks compared to ads served. The only problem was that the ad was up for just 2-3hrs before the budget had ran out. We were hoping for a lot more time than that. Even on the days of $0.30 per click our ad budget was filled within a couple of hours. To mitigate this, I had moved the CPC budget to $0.25 for a few hours. This again had its own problems with hardly any ads being served (maybe 2000 in a few hours) but still clicks on the ad.

Visits to the site

Another hopeful result of advertising Rob’s desperation to get a girlfriend - was to get some ‘freebies’ on his site. No I’m not being coarse, what we wanted was people visiting Rob’s site without clicking on the ad itself. Basically free ad conversions without clicks. We certainly did get them I’ve put them below - you can see the higher number visits to Rob’s site compared with clicks on the ad.

The highest day of clicks also coincides with the highest day of visits. On average the site draws 3-4 visits a day (no traffic) so to see it go to 46 visits (28 ‘free’ visits) was an encouraging sign. Though this cannot be only related to the ad itself. Word had spread that the ad was up - so some people may have not seen the ad but still visited Rob’s site.

Conclusions

• Although being written from a first person perspective and following advice from other observers on its image - the ad still did not receive a high CTR. We were hoping for this anyway - so this can be seen as a good result. However from other people’s advice we were expecting a higher CTR. Most likely taking the option to pay per 1000 impressions is going to cost you a lot more than the potential result you will get from paying per click.
• The main problem we had with this ad was achieving a high impression rate with a low CTR over a long time. Either you don’t get seen and the ad is up for a lot longer, or you do get seen and your ad is gone very quickly. You might get relatively free ads served up - but only for a short period of time.
• We are yet to see if this actually works. That is, that Rob gets a girlfriend. He has had a few contacts because of the ad - let’s see what happens.

~Andrew (email me andrew at brownbox dot net dot au).

There have been various people talking about the value of advertising on Facebook.com recently. Most coming to the conclusion that putting an ad up on Facebook will not get you many clicks but thousands of impressions (times the ad was loaded on a page).

Well we decided to do our own experiment with a little bit of humour to see what the results would be. The purpose? To test variations of ads, and recommendations from other marketers online regarding Facebook’s advertising results.

We created the ad to the right for our first test. The ad is uses the Facebook colours and similar style branding to take the advice of one blogger who said it might increase click throughs or noticability. See below for the cost per click, and the budget set at $5 per day. This ad has a run of 7 days, you can see the first results below - at the end of the campaign in 7 days. The “target market” - Women aged between 18-30 from Australia.

Our initial results (after about 2hrs of having the ad up).

Here’s the initial response :

1. 22578 impressions (in about 2hrs)
2. 10 clicks
3. 2 new Facebook friends for Rob
4. 1 filled in the form on the website www.roblincolne.com

See More Results