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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 :)

We create a lot of emails for people, brochures, newsletters, once-off invitations and more.

Usually these have a unique look and feel and require some kind of customisation, but with the world of html emails, consistency and display reliability is a hard thing to achieve thanks to the wide variety of archaic email clients being used.

This article here provides a handy little checklist of CSS items that are available to you, but it doesn’t not list the new hotmail “Live Mail” and as there are differences in the way CSS is handled we must press on.

The best article we’ve come across is written by the fantastic guys at Campaign Monitor right here. What are some of the main points we took away? We’ve distilled it way down for you anyway.

As with many things coded for cross-client compatibility the weakest link becomes the greatest determiner in what you can and can’t do in an email design. Especially as it’s extremely difficult, nigh impossible to segment your recipients based on what client they’re using. So, when it comes to sending through those shiny HTML emails Gmail and Outlook 2007 become those weak links that imform the way most of your design is hard-coded into the email. Question: So what do you do?

Answer: Table based inline css, and check the list of inline-options that you wish to use are supported (do what we did and printed off the Campaign Monitor’s article and stick it on your wall/foreheards).

Sure, you may have to spend a few more minutes adding code and feeling like a Neanderthal coder, but at least it’s going to deliver consistent brand integrity and professional results to your valued publics. Onward Ho!

~Rob

P.S. I just found this super article if you want a more comprehensive checklist when writing those HTML emails. It’s pretty old, but gives you good info on how to satisfy GMail and has some good practices in there. You know, just in case you had the itch for some helpful extra reading.

Email newsletters are the best way to maintain customer relationships on the Internet. Don’t have a newsletter? Jakob Nielsen says “If you don’t have a newsletter, then publishing one is probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence.”

If you already have a newsletter then you will find that your readers will most likely:

• Be inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text;
• Scan the email; and
• Spend on average 51 seconds reading your newsletter.

To write a better newsletter consider these techniques Neilsen suggests:

• Make your newsletter simple;
• Highlight key terms;
• Be predictable. Keep a consistent newsletter style and delivery time;
• Use meaningful headings and sub headings; and
• Be personal and real. Relationships are not built with marketing language.

Brown Box has the expertise and service to help you maintain your customer relationships. It’s called MailBox - and many of our clients have great relationships with their customers from using it. Contact me to find out how yours can too.

~Andrew

We’ve recently installed an update to our great email broadcast software, ‘MailBox‘, that I am sure many of you are familiar with.

I thought I’d just outline a few of the key features which you might enjoy. We’re excited about many of them and know it’s going to provide you with an even better means for keeping in contact with your important publics in a professional way.

• Subscription Rules. Automatically subscribe/unsubscribe from multiple lists when person subscribes/unsubscribes from a given list. These rules are setup per list.
• CSV import file can be separated by comma or tab
• Added support for emails with long TLDs (such as .travel)
• Restructured code.
• Enhanced forward to friend
• View and click through stats for autoresponders
• New import process
• Unlimited options for sending filters
• Improved subscribe by email
• New reporting options
• Reasons for unsubscribing option added
• Subscriber stats
• Enhanced custom redirects
• Firefox compatible editor
• Send to a friend for auto responders
• Web version for auto responders
• Sending filters for autoresponders
• HTML, Text, or Multi-Format Autoresponders
• More message personalization options
• Send last message when adding new subscriber
• New interface (public and admin)
• Remove duplicates shows results
• Attachments for auto responders

To find out more about MailBox click here, or contact us. We’d love to talk.

~ Rob

Our good friends at Campaign Monitor are always such a wealth of advice. Looking on Stylegala this week we found a link to an interesting article asking if HTML forms in broadcast emails are a good thing or not.

The long and the short of it is ‘no’ because of the email client’s (Outlook/.Mac/Thunderbird/Mail etc) position that these forms can represent a security risk.

Campaign Monitor’s helpful table showed us that while the form may be displayed in all clients but Outlook 2007 *sigh*, it’s not able to be used in every case. This rather compelling research gives some concrete evidence suggesting that perhaps a way of engaging with your customers via a form is best not in your actual broadcast email.

So, instead of sending a form which will be dubiously received, at best, to your valued client’s inbox, simply present them with a link to a well formatted accessible form (here’s a good ‘how-to’ for you web guys out there) on your website. Sure to work, look good and ensure a professional credible result.

Need help on creating forms, surveys or creating and sending an email campaign? Contact us, we’d love to help.

~ Rob