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| The CAN SPAM Act: Are You In Compliance?
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Unless you spent the holiday season
hiding out in the Alaskan frontier, you’re certainly aware of
the new rules regarding commercial email messages. But the big
question is, Are you ready to comply?
President Bush signed the CAN SPAM Act
of 2003 on December 16. This new law, which became effective Jan. 1,
2004, places new but not onerous restrictions on mailers, advertisers
and senders.
When sending commercial email messages,
mailers are now simply required to 1) provide truthful subject
labeling, 2) include clear opt-out instructions, and 3) include
the sender’s physical mailing address. What’s so hard about those requirements?
The Act basically prohibits the use
of deceptive subject lines and false headers in messages.
Here’s a few “best practices” to consider implementing: keep a
functioning return email address, handle opt-out requests within
10 business days, and make sure opt-out links are kept alive for
at least 30 days.
How big of a problem is spam?
Consider these statistics from American Online. AOL blocked
more than 500 billion spam emails in 2003, or more than 15,000
per member. In total, AOL said it blocked more than 75 percent
of the email sent to its subscribers. Among the top 10 spam subject
lines were “Viagra online” and “online pharmacy.” To try to fools
spam filters, spammers turned to such tactics as deliberately
misspelling words in the subject lines.
The law calls for, but does not require,
a do-not-email registry from the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC,
state attorneys general, and Internet service providers will enforce
the law.
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| Nevada Has Most Movers, Louisiana Least
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About 120 million (46 percent) of the
nation’s population that was five years old and over in 2000 lived
in a different home than they did in 1995, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau report.
Twenty-five percent moved within the
same county, 10 percent between counties in the same state and 8
percent between states; three percent had moved from abroad.
Nevada led all states in the mobility
of its population—63 percent were movers. Colorado and Arizona
followed at 56 percent each. California, Arizona and Nevada had
the highest proportion of people who changed residences within
the same county, about 31 percent each.
In 2000, about 60 percent of the
U.S. population lived in the state where they were born.
Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan had the highest proportion
of residents who lived in the same state where they were born
(79 percent, 78 percent and 75 percent) while Nevada, Florida
and Arizona had the lowest (21 percent, 33 percent and 35 percent).
The report, titled Geographic Mobility: 1995 to 2000, was issued
September 2003.
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| Get Your Database In Shape for CRM
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Learn why data quality is the key to performing
effective multi-channel marketing and CRM. No direct marketer should
pass up this story. Data quality is the key to performing effective
multi-channel marketing and CRM. Without accurate and complete data,
companies rely on insufficient and wrong information for their analytics
and campaign management, which can negatively affect their business
results. Keith Yagnik, vertical practice leader, retail and pharma
at Harte-Hanks, and Mark Douma, senior marketing manager at Target
Direct, noted four keys to enhancing data quality in their session
“How to Boost CRM Success with High-Quality Data” at the DMA’s Annual
Conference Exhibition last week.
- Data capture: Identify customers in all contact channels
and complete, correct or verify their contact information while
you have them on the phone or at your Web site. You’ll keep your
data cleaner and more recent with this best practice.
- Data hygiene: Use hygiene tools available to you, such as PCOA
(proprietary change of address) and the U.S. Postal Service’s
NCOA, LACS, DSF2, DPV and apartment number append services.
- Data standardization: Identify and standardize all name and
address data elements to allow for improved matching and personalized
communications.
- Matching: Use a variety of data fields and matching criteria
to compare for de-duplication of customer records, as well as
creating a more complete view of your customers and their activity
with your company. For example, you might match on street name,
last name, house number, P.O. Box, postal code and city. Determine
which data fields are likely to provide a valid match, and then
fine-tune your criteria to perfect your match rate.
From TM Tipline, by Hallie Mummert, editor in chief, Target Marketing
& Inside Direct Mail |
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| E-Merchants Use Address Verification to Control Fraud
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| While two-thirds of
e-merchants say they took more online fraud precautions in 2002,
total dollar fraud losses are increasing, according to the Online
Fraud Report, an independent survey undertaken by CyberSource Corp.
Among other top findings from the report: Online fraud is a
"serious" or "very serious" concern for 46 percent of those
surveyed; Manual review is common since more merchants are reviewing
more orders manually; Two-thirds say they plan to implement
additional fraud control measures in 2003. A variety of tools are
being put into place to deter credit card fraud. Seventy-one percent
of merchants say they are using address verification in 2002, up
from 46 percent the year before, and penetration audits have
doubled, from 30 percent in 2001 to 63 percent in 2002. Even as
merchants say they are already employing anti-fraud tools,
two-thirds say they plan to implement more in the next 6 to 12
months. Among the top strategies mentioned ! are: new
Visa/MasterCard authentication plans (40 percent), card number
verification (29 percent), and address verification services (21
percent). |
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| ZIP Code 12345-6789 is Alive and Well |
| There is a growing problem
that the USPS is very concerned with, regarding the use of the ZIP
code 12345-6789 in promotional examples. Many marketers typically
use ZIP 12345-6789 as an example of addressing standards in
promotional literature and other venues. Even the USPS's PAVE
department is guilty of using it on standardized documentation
samples and on illustrations on the white board when working through
preparation issues. It turns out that 12345-6789 is a real live ZIP.
Inadvertently mail is getting made up to this ZIP regularly and
creating a significant processing problem for Schenectady, NY. A
better ZIP example to use for promotions is 98765-4321. "987" is an
unassigned ZIP and therefore eliminates the possibility of mail
ending up in the mail stream. You can help the USPS by prohibiting
the use of 12345-6789 for promotional purposes within your own
organizations and by spreading the word to your users. |
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| National Change of Address (NCOA) is for any class of
mailing. |
| A Change of Address update
is essential any time you plan a direct mail campaign. If you have
targeted a market by name and address you must update the addresses
as they change. The USPS only requires NCOA for First Class
automation or pre-sort mailings. This requirement was implemented
only for delivery efficiency. The USPS is in business to deliver
mail, and not in the direct mail advice business. Any successful
direct marketer would tell you that NCOA is required every time you
are targeting an audience with a mailing. A mailer must compensate
for the fact that 10% of their list will be moving every year and
become invalid. We can associate this to a hunter that aims at a
moving target. He will always lead his shot to compensate for the
movement. If the hunter does not lead his shot he will miss his
target. If a direct marketer does not lead his target, by using
NCOA, he will miss 10% of his targets. That means that 10% of the
money and effort spent on the direct mail campaign will be wasted
before the piece even leaves the mail house. Here are some NCOA
facts to consider before mailing: --17% of Americans change
addresses annually. --43 million people move annually. --The average
American moves 11 times during their lifetime. --One of every six
families moves each year. --The USPS processed 44 million address
changes in 1998. |
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| Phone Append...Quick & Easy to Append Numbers in Your
List! |
| Use Philix Technologies's
Residential and Business Phone Append Services to keep your list
finely tuned for all your marketing campaigns. Append the most
recent business phone numbers to your list from over 10 million
business establishments. Append the most recent residential phone
numbers based on a consumer information database that covers 90% of
the households in the United States. Ask us for a quote. |
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| Viral Marketing is Infectious |
| A lot of the energy behind
the Internet is the ability for everyone to be a publisher.
Consequently, we are in a land grab for precious spectrum - people's
attention. Attention is finite. Rising above the noise of a thousand
voices requires creativity. Shouting is not very creative. Just
hanging up a web shingle and hoping for visitors is not very
creative. Rather, new companies can structure their businesses in a
way that allows them to grow like a virus and lock out the existing
bricks and mortar competitors through innovative pricing and
exploitation of these competitors' legacy distribution channel
conflict. In 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith pioneered a great
new product category -- free web-based email. But many great ideas
and great products have withered on the vine. The special catalyst
for Hotmail's torrid growth is what we at Draper Fisher Jurvetson
have come to call "Viral Marketing" -- not because any traditional
viruses are involved, but because of the pattern of rapid adoption
through word-of-mouth networks. Viral Marketing powerfully compounds
the benefits of a first-mover advantage. And it's something we
eagerly look for when evaluating any Internet startup company. As a
founding investor in Hotmail and a member of their board of
directors, we think Hotmail is a great case study on the impact of
the Viral Marketing strategy over its full life cycle. The Hotmail
adoption pattern is that of a virus - with spatial and network
locality. People typically send e-mails to their associates and
friends; many of them are geographically close, and others are
scattered around with clusters in areas of high Internet
connectivity. We would notice the first user from a university town
or from India, and then the number of subscribers from that region
would rapidly proliferate. The beauty of it is that none of this
required any marketing dollars. Customers do the selling. Digital
viruses can spread internationally more rapidly than biological
viruses that rely on the physical proximity of hosts for their
spread - via a sneeze or handshake. Hotmail is the largest email
provider in Sweden and India despite the fact that they have done no
marketing of any sort in these countries. It's a happy day when you
discover your business has displaced several entrenched competitors
to become the market share leader in a country you have never
visited. What's more, Hotmail is used in over 220 countries, despite
the limitation that it is only available in English. Viral Marketing
captures the essence of multi-level-marketing and applies it to all
customers - the "word-of-mouth" spread of the Hotmail message is
involuntary. And it's more powerful than many other marketing
techniques that lack the implied endorsement from a friend. Hotmail
had "Free Email" buttons on several other highly-trafficked web
sites, but they generated comparatively negligible numbers of
subscriptions. Juno has shown that advertising is relatively
cost-ineffective. It is hard to spend your way to Hotmail-like
growth. The snowball effect is a mechanism to greatly leverage a
first-mover advantage. Whenever a product involves people other than
the purchaser, then there is an opportunity to market to potential
new customers. It is no surprise that Amazon encourages its
customers to send a book as a gift to a friend. When the recipient
receives the gift book, the packaging contains a flyer for the
amazon.com service. Similarly, whenever someone uses iShip.com to
send a package, the recipient will learn about how iShip.com can
save them money on their shipping needs. As more Internet and
Intranet applications move beyond computation to embrace
communication, the Viral Marketing strategy has wide applicability.
E-commerce, groupware, community, messaging and promotions
businesses can all use these techniques to further the Internet
explosion. In addition to Hotmail, we have seen a similar viral
communications approach taken by Mirabilis, an Israeli-based company
that signed up twelve million instant messaging subscribers to its
ICQ service before its acquisition by AOL for almost $300 million.
To use ICQ, both parties need to download the client software. So
each subscriber ends up emailing their friends to solicit them to
engage in this new communication channel. The friends in turn,
experience the product first hand, and may repeat the pattern. It's
like the old shampoo commercial refrain "they told two friends who
told two friends, and so on." While powerful, these dyadic
communication products recruit new customers one by one. |
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| USPS Looks to Link E-Mail and Snail Mail in the
Future |
| Beginning this September
2000, the U.S.P.S. will begin testing an innovative new program
aimed at connecting the traditional Postal Service with e-mail
technology. Called mailing online, this program will allow a
customer to e-mail a document to the Postal Service, who will then
forward the e-mail to the proper post office branch, where the
document will be printed, placed in an envelope, and mailed to the
physical address indicated on the e-mail. The service will most
likely cost 40 cents for two black-and-white pages. Sue Brennan, a
spokesperson for the Postal Service, explained that this new service
is being developed for small businesses that are looking for a
hassle-free method of direct mailing. The program is one step toward
"link[ing] physical addresses with e-mail addresses," Brennan
noted. |
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| Getting People To Read Your E-Mail
Newsletters |
| Send your newsletters
midweek and midday. There are times when newsletters always get
deleted in bulk. Don't send your newsletters at these times.
Anything that arrives on a Friday is toast. People are trying to get
out of the office and enjoy their weekend - with an empty inbox.
Everything unimportant gets wiped. Mondays are just as bad. Send
your message Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. The same rules go for
the time of day. Don't send your message after 3 p.m. It will get
lost in the end-of-day rush of mail or sit until the next morning's
delete session. But, there is plenty of time to read during or just
after lunch. (Taken from "Getting Readers for E-Mail Newsletters" in
DM News 7/24/00, by Andy Sernovitz). |
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| The Tab for Poor Data: $600 Billion
Yearly |
| A new study shows that
poor data quality costs U.S. businesses an estimated $600 billion a
year. The report by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) shows that
there is a significant gap between perception and reality regarding
the quality of data in many organizations, and that current data
quality problems cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion per
year. The report's findings were based on interviews with industry
experts, leading-edge customers, and survey data from 647
respondents. In recent years, the failure and delay of many high
profile IT projects as a result of unanticipated data quality
problems is causing executives to wake up to the real cost of poor
quality data, said Wayne Eckerson, director of education and
research at TDWI. However, almost 50 percent of survey respondents
express no current plans to implement an initiative to improve data
quality, while 78 percent said their organizations need additional
education about the importance of data quality and methods to
maintain and improve it. The good news is that achieving high
quality data is not beyond the means of any company, continued
Eckerson. Companies that have invested in managing and improving
data quality can clearly cite the tangible and intangible benefits
of doing so. According to the report, benefits include improved
customer satisfaction, a single version of the truth, and greater
confidence in analytical systems. |
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| New Study Calculates Mail Delivery
Accuracy |
| According to USPS data,
between 400 and 560 million pieces of mail per year are
misdelivered, based on results for the third quarter between
February and May. The volume of misdeliveries represents 0.28
percent of the total volume of mail estimated at 200 billion of
pieces this year. Further, on average, 1.67 percent of the time an
address is likely to receive some amount of misdelivered mail. The
USPS says misdeliveries most often occur when the recipient's name
or street number are incorrect. These results, published in the
August 19th edition of Postal World, are part of a new ongoing study
of delivery accuracy conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the
USPS. |
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| USPS Book to Help Small Businesses |
| Just when you though you
had enough books in your library, another must-have volume is right
around the corner. The U.S. Postal Service this summer will publish
the Guide to Mailing for Businesses and Organizations. The
announcement was made at a USPS luncheon in New York last week.
Currently in draft form, it describes the domestic products and
services available to businesses and organizations, including
information on how to qualify for discount mailing services. The
publication is the Postal Service's way of reaching out to people to
explain how the postal service can help small businesses grow, said
Pat McCabe, marketing specialist, mail preparation and standards for
the USPS. The book is being promoted as an easier read than the
current Domestic Mail Manual. |
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