Information for businesses - What to do

What not to do

From the definition of UBE, we know that UBE is any email message that is sent to a large number of recipients who have not explicitly and knowingly requested it.

Never, ever send email messages to large numbers people you don't even know. Doing this will guarantee that almost every recipient will avoid doing business with you ever again. It will also get your business listed on many sites as a spammer, and you will never shake the stigma with anything remotely resembling a reasonable number of the targets.

Further than that - if you send any sort of email message to large numbers of people who weren't expecting those messages, even if they're your customers, even if they have ordered from your web site, even if they gave your their email address willingly, some of those recipients will consider it spam. Some of them will never do business with you again. Some of them will respond with varying degrees of politeness telling you to cease and desist, and others will set up filters in their email software to ensure that they never see any email from your business again. Some will do all of these.You will never know how many customers you have lost by doing this.

Email that is sent to large numbers of customers who weren't expecting it is called acquaintance spam, and this practice is illegal in Australia in some circumstances, as well as being a sure way to lose customers. In fact it will even lose you customers who would have requested the same messages if you had given them the choice up-front.

It doesn't matter if your message advertises a product, invites them to a party or notifies the customer of a serious security flaw in the software product you sold them, if they didn't ask for that type of message, some of your customers will regard it as spam and will react accordingly.

Fortunately there is a way of making sure the customer has made the choice, and knows they have made the choice, without risking losing subscribers. We will discuss this later.

What you can do with customer email addresses

When a customer gives you their email address, it is usually for a specific reason. Generally speaking, unless the customer says otherwise, you should only use the email address for that specific reason.

Sometimes the reason is implied. For example, if a customer puts their email address into an order form, it is usually so that the vendor can keep them up to date on the order status. If a customer puts the email address into a product or conference registration form, it is so that the vendor can notify them of defects in their completion of the registration form. If a customer puts the email address into a trial software download form, it is generally taken to be used by the vendor to track the number of distinct downloads - given that downloads can fail.

Generally speaking, you can send one email message of any topic to the customer at the time they supply their email address. It is advisable, however, to make it at least in part related to the supply of the email address, and make sure it's sent promptly. A message that's sent one week after you get the email address may be considered to be spam, and a message which tells the customer about an unrelated product may be considered to be spam.

How to manage customer subscriptions

When you want to subscribe a customer to regular mailings, you must give them the choice, up front, right where they provide the email address. If you fail to do this you are 100% guaranteed to lose customers.

In the past it has been common to use a check box on a form to ask if a customer wants to receive ongoing email notifications, however experience has shown that the check box is woefully inadequate to the task - if a user doesn't touch the check box, you can't be sure they left it that way because that was their choice, or if they simply didn't notice the box.

The choice then becomes, with the check box, do you default it to "on", and risk being perceived as a spammer, or do you default it to "off", and risk missing out on communications opportunities with the customer. Neither of these prospects is appealing to a business.

The answer to this is to use radio buttons with no default. For example, try submitting the form below without selecting one of the buttons. If you have a JavaScript enabled browser, you cannot submit this form without making the choice. For browsers that are not JavaScript enabled, the script that processes the form can check to see if any option was chosen and ask the customer to go back and make a selection.

If you submit the form when you have selected a button, you will get a message stating that the script doesn't exist. That's because this form is for demonstration purposes only - if this were a real form, you wouldn't get that message.

You can do the same thing with paper based forms - have two check boxes, and if somebody selects neither, or both, that is a defect in completing the form and it is perfectly reasonable to send them an email asking them to clarify their choice.

By using radio buttons with no default, you can guarantee that nobody misses out who wants your updates, and nobody gets them who does not want them. Experience at the first site that has used this method shows that you can get a phenomenal 90% subscription rate using this method, and zero complaints.

Going Further

Sometimes you might have a "critical notice" that you are certain every customer needs to see. For example, if your business is acquired by another business, you may have an obligation to inform them that their personal details are now being transferred to a new entity. Unfortunately, there are only two options in the previous selection - "Yes" and "No", and this limitation means you cannot send the critical notice to people who have selected "No".

This means you will need to have a third choice - "Critical Notices Only". People who select "Critical Notices Only" should only be sent information that has a direct effect on them or on their ability to use your service. They should never be sent promotional material or trivial notices such as "we've changed our web site."

Allowing for critical notices means having a form like this:

If somebody selects "don't send me announcements of any kind," you should not include them in even the most critical update - they will view any kind of bulk message from you as spam, no matter what that message contains.

Protecting against fraud

One more thing remains - fraud protection. Unfortunately some people think it's cute to subscribe other people to material they don't want.

When you take subscriptions via the web, you should send a message to the subscribed email address immediately. This message should contain the time and date of the subscription, and all readily available information about the web client that requested that subscription.

For your own protection, you should keep information on how somebody subscribed on file indefinitely. Sometimes people do forget that they subscribed to things, and it is useful to be able to show them that in fact they did consciously subscribe.

Contents
Preface - Why this is the most important lesson in Internet marketing you will ever read.
Overview - What the problem means to you.
Microeconomics of Spam - the economist's view.
Getting Permission - how to get permission for the first mailing.
What to do - Easy ways to avoid being labelled as a spammer, and still get what you want out of email lists.
The law - The current state of the law on this issue.