The
Top Five Questions and Answers about Responsible
Email Marketing
By Mike Adams
Question Four: What is the
impact of the do not email list?
To understand the answer to this question,
you have to look at the brief history of the
national “Do Not Call” list, implemented
in October 2003 by the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC). The Do Not Call list was implemented in
response to consumer complaints about telemarketers
interrupting their key means of communication
with annoying phone calls. I call this practice
“phone spam.” Telemarketing is in
fact just like spam, because it's unsolicited,
untargeted, and rather annoying. Consumers apparently
agreed with that definition, which eventually
motivated them to generate tremendous political
pressure to solve the telemarketing problem.
The Do Not Call list was thus implemented,
and call volume dropped off significantly for
those people who submitted their phone numbers
for the list, making it a tremendous success in
the eyes of the public and the politicians who
passed the law. Riding on the momentum of the
success of this list, many people and lawmakers
wanted to pass a similar law to help stem the
email spam problem. This is what gave rise to
the national “Do Not Email” list,
even though the idea of the Do Not Email list
is based on faulty reasoning: that spammers will
adhere to the law. And, as we've seen following
the implementation of federal anti-spam legislation
that went into effect Jan. 1, 2004, spammers
simply ignore federal law. They will not comply.
Thus, the Do Not Email list idea is dead on arrival.
It will have absolutely no impact on spammers,
and will only serve to confuse legitimate email
marketers and create an ever-increasing burden
on them to comply with a law that has no bottom
line benefit to the public.
Personally, based on these reasons and many
others, I hope and predict that the Do Not Email
list idea will never be implemented. It is bad
policy and it won't stop spam. You will hopefully
never need to comply with a Do Not Email list;
however, if the political process continues to
move forward despite the rather obvious evidence
that spammers do not comply with federal law,
it is possible that the Do Not Email list idea
will be passed and you will be forced to comply
with it. In such a case, you will only have to
download the list of email addresses from the
FTC and purge those emails from your existing
database, making sure that you never email those
people any sort of unsolicited email advertisement.
You can still email people on those lists if
they are your existing customers and you have
their permission—the conditions under which
you should be emailing people in the first place,
lending even more irrelevance to the Do Not Email
list concept. This is because email marketers
who are mailing people with their permission
don't need to use the list, and spammers who
are emailing people without their permission
will simply refuse to use the list.
So the bottom-line answer
to the question of what will be the impact of
the Do Not Email list concept is a simple one:
it will be an extra hoop for legitimate, responsible
email marketers. Passage of the Do Not Email list
will serve as good political posturing for a few
lawmakers who want to create the impression they
are doing something to fight spam, even though
spammers are doing nothing to comply with the
law.
|
