See link below - this is a fantastic flow chart for understanding the Anti SPAM Act.

Click here

Thank you to Rick Shera who is a Partner of Lowndes Jordan for allowing me to link to his awesome creation!

Tags: anti spam act, lowndes jordan, rick shera

Here are our top tips for newsletter success:

1. Keep It Relevant: Ensure your newsletters contain ‘news’ or content that is highly relevant to your subscribers. We recommend mailing list segmentation to achieve targeted marketing. Your newsletter communication can contain your special deals, new products services – as long as the information is relevant to your subscribers.
2. Short and Frequent: Email newsletters can be just a few paragraphs yet highly effective - we suggest you keep your newsletters short and frequent to win your subscribers respect, interest and trust.
3. Share and Receive: Share your expertise and receive a healthy open rate from your subscribers. Providing a regular helpful tip in your newsletters can be the factor or ‘tipping point’ that results in your newsletters being opened and read. If your newsletters are known to provide relevant, helpful information they are more likely to be viewed by your subscribers every time.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen listed email newsletters as “probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence.”

“Junk war rages on despite spam act”

“NZ Anti-Spam Law Seen as Ineffective”

and on and on….

One thing that still bugs me to this day is most people (who should know better) in  the email marketing/ISP sector believing that the NZ Anti-SPAM Act will somehow magically reduce the amount of SPAM Kiwi’s will receive.

Come on!!

As I have said time and time again – there are 200 core spammers that are responsible for 80% of the worlds spam – 99.9% of them do not live in NZ and most wouldn’t even know we existed nor care in the slightest about the Act.

How do people think that the Act will stop the SPAM that is generated overseas??

The Act was provided to give the NZ government some power if by chance a spammer decided to setup shop in NZ – that’s it!!

I almost fell off my chair with laughter after reading this press release on scoop today. Below is an extract of the press release.

“New Zealand’s largest printing services company, PMP NZ Limited, predicts the introduction of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act will boost an already buoyant unaddressed media market, and provide great opportunities for the company’s newly launched division, PMP Direct.”

Source

We so far have two clients who stopped their printed media services because of two main reasons:

1. Its expensive – VERY expensive compared to email. Their entire email marketing budget for the year costs the same for 1 month of printed media including the postage costs!
2. Its not measureable – our clients can see in real time who opened their email, who clicked on what link.

I for one always grab any kind of unaddressed printed media that pollutes my personal mail box and companies mail box and dump it straight in the trash. It is astounding the waste of natural materials that goes into producing mountains of glossy printed material. There should be a law that controls the amount of unaddressed printed material companies are allowed to produce - just imagine how many resources are used to produce this stuff when most of it ends up in my trash.

Personally I do not read any unaddressed media as a protest for the excessive waste and damage printed media causes the environment. Now I may be wrong but that’s how I see it.

Tags: anti spam act, legislation, new zealand, nz

“The Government’s anti-spam team received 155 complaints from the public about spam e-mails during the first week that the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act was in force.”

That’s quite a good effort when you think that most consumers would not even be aware of the NZ Anti-SPAM Act.

The real effort for the DIA is determining if the spammer is in fact based in NZ – if not then I would think there would be no reason to pursue the spammer. Most people don’t realize that 80% of the SPAM sent is generated by 200 core spammers who are mostly based in the US, China and Russia. Some of the spammers based in the US are in fact sending SPAM which is compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act!

Tags: anti spam act, dia, new zealand, nz

“What information should I keep about consent and for how long? ”

Below is the data our Mobilize Mail system captures for each subscriber. The subscriber data is kept in our system for as long as the client is with us. I recommend you keep the same amount of information as well - it might be overkill but its a safe option

Details that should be kept include evidence of:

(a) consents to the receiving of commercial electronic messages;

(b) time of sending, and content, of all commercial electronic messages sent to recipients;

(c) unsubscribe facilities included in the commercial electronic messages; and

(d) removal of the recipient from a mailing list, including any messages confirming removal.

Sending Opt-out Reconfirmation Emails

No… No… No…!!

You cannot send an email to your subscribers saying:

If you do not wish to receive emails from “AMCE”, please reply and type UNSUBSCRIBE in the Subject Line.

That is not getting consent!! That is called Opt-out and it is not permitted as stated in the Unsolicited Electronic Message Act 2007. If you don’t believe me then here is the DIA response to an email I sent them which contained this approach.

Essentially having looked at the content of the e mail message to your client from <company name removed> they are wrong if they are making an assumption that no response should be treated and taken as consent from a recipient to continue with the relationship and to continue to send commercial electronic messages.

A large number of companies are currently sanitizing their address lists to ensure that they have the recipient’s consent to send commercial electronic messages. This would need to be completed by 5 September 2005, which is the date when the new Act comes into force.

In relation to your question, to ensure that the consent you receive complies with the new Act, it is better to ask the question in the positive form, getting them to “opt in” rather than “opt out”. (e.g. If you wish to receive promotional emails please click here etc).

Correspondence cannot establish consent for future purposes. Many recipients may have treated emails to unsubscribe, or to “opt out” if they do not wish to receive promotional information as Spam, and not open or responded to it.

There is no real relationship when the communication is one sided, and the recipient’s silence should not be taken as acquiescence.

It is up to the sender to prove such consent existed. If a complaint is made, the Anti Spam Compliance Unit would ask why the sender believed such consent existed. Whatever method is used to collect evidence of consent (ie written form, “tick boxes”, records of phone conversations etc) should be sufficient to satisfy any investigation should a complaint be made. This applies to old email contacts, as well as any future contacts.

If in doubt, you should obtain consent before commercial electronic messages are sent.

I am sure you have already familiarised yourself with the DIA complaints page, I have copied the link for your information.

http://complaints.antispam.govt.nz/EmailComplaint.aspx

Hope this helps.

On Friday we attended the Department of Internal Affair’s (DIA) workshop on the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007(Act). Running for a little over an hour the workshop covered the basics of what Spam is and how you may know you have come into contact with it (emails like: Nigerian Scams, Russian Brides, Degrees etc).

The grounds for bringing in the legislation were provided and some of the reasons mentioned were: preventing a lack in user confidence in electronic communication and in particular electronic commerce; Spam clogs networks and is a threat to network integrity and security. Spam reduces productivity and can result in identity theft.

For those of you that didn’t know the Act and it’s regulations were drafted by the Ministry of Economic Development, however the enforcement of the Act is in the hands of the DIA. A simple explanation of how to know if a message is Spam was offered by the DIA: If the message is electronic; commercial and unsolicited it is Spam. The message is not Spam unless it meets all three requirements (unsolicited, electronic and commercial). So before you send a message – assess it and contact the recipient by telephone, fax or snail mail to get approval before sending your message.

If your message is ‘commercial’ – contains information about your goods & services (definition supplied in the Good & Services Guarantees Act) then you will also need to provide an ‘unsubscribe’ facility and process the unsubscribe within five days.

It is easy to report Spam – go to www.antispam.govt.nz (live from Wednesday 5th Sept 07) and the disciplinary process can be as many as four steps or if the spam is severe enough only one step – straight to court!

I had an irate sales manager ring me up today wanting to confirm with me something she had heard on the sales grapevine.

They had just won a great opportunity with a large organisation in New Zealand. A department within the organisation had signed up for a deal to be supplied with Product X from the sales manager’s company. The department’s boss was so impressed by the deal that he instructed the sales manager to tell all the other “Heads of Departments” within the organisation how happy he was and that they all should sign up.

What the sales manager was irate about is that she heard after the 5th of September it will be illegal to do that!

Yes you heard it – the head of the department who signed the deal cannot provide consent for another person within the organisation. There are some exceptions around this and I needed to get the DIA’s input. See below for their response.

So you maybe asking “Whats the problem? Just tell the head of department to send the email himself”.

Good point but it’s not that easy in sales sometimes. You would be foolish to leave such an important opportunity to sell throughout the entire organisation to a staff member you cannot control and may forget to send the email.

DIA Response

We have had an opportunity to consider your question.

It appears as though the scenario is similar to that of viral marketing, or friend get friend campaigns, where a person gives consent to a third party company to send commercial electronic messages to a friend (or in this case a business associate) relying on “inferred consent”.

In short, the answer to your question is no, the work associate cannot provide consent for another work associate.

A friend can send an electronic message (whether commercial or not) to another friend, relying on the relationship between the two parties. This is an example of “inferred consent”. However, one friend cannot consent of behalf of another friend for a third party to send the other friend commercial electronic messages. In this case, it is one work associate giving the consent of another work associate.

Depending on the work relationships within your client’s company, she would be able to on-send the newsletter herself, relying on “inferred consent”. She cannot advise your company to send it on her behalf.

It could be possible for an authorised person (such as a General Manager, Chief Executive Officer etc) of an organisation to give express consent to send commercial electronic messages to the organisation’s employees using the organisation’s electronic addresses. The authorised person could be considered as the relevant electronic address holder as they would be responsible for the company infrastructure, such as the actual computers; company website; domain name; email address; bandwidth etc. The company employee would be any other person who uses that electronic address. In the case of “sales reps” I am assuming that the company owns any computers and is responsible for any associated communication costs.

The commercial electronic message would need to comply with the Act. It would need to identify the sender, and in some cases, provide an unsubscribe facility. The question arises whether the company employee could unsubscribe to a commercial electronic message which was authorised by the company’s authorised person. This requirement can be voided if the requirement for a functional unsubscribe facility is inconsistent with the terms of the contract, arrangement or understanding between the person who authorised the sending of the principal message and the recipient.

Below is another email sent from DIA just after the initial one above providing some helpful feedback about how the sales manager could in fact spread the word without breaking the law. These guys are good (DIA) and I am still to this day very impressed with the response rate to my questions and the amount of detail they provide.

For further clarification, a recipient, in relation to the sending of an electronic message to an electronic address, means the relevant electronic address holder and any other person who uses that electronic address. A relevant electronic address holder means the person who is responsible for the relevant electronic address.

Express consent is consent, whether given by the relevant electronic address holder or any other person who uses the relevant electronic address.

Normally, a person cannot give consent for someone else. In most cases, if you have the consent to send commercial electronic messages to one single person at a company, it is not a licence to send commercial electronic messages to other personnel within the same company.

However, the CEO, director (or someone who has the ability to authorise such a request) can be considered as the person who is responsible for the relevant electronic addressbeing, and can therefore advise a third party company that it can send messages to any employee the authorised person nominates, effectively giving the third party company “express consent”.

With that express consent, the third party provider could directly send the messages to the nominated electronic addresses. Note, for this to apply, the electronic addresses should be “work” addresses effectively “owned” by the authorised person’s company.

The second option is to rely on “inferred consent”. The work associate could receive your newsletter, and depending on the work environment, could choose to on send the newsletter to other associates if she felt that the business relationship allowed her to send such messages.

Tags: dia, new zealand, nz, SPAM

Here is a very interesting question from a blog reader.

“So do I need an unsubscribe facility in an email that I send an established customer who I have been doing business with for over days/months/years?”

If I have interpreted the Act correctly my understanding is that YES they would need to add an unsubscribe facility to every commercial email sent regardless of the relationship UNLESS the recipient has agreed that an unsubscribe facility is not required.

And just to confirm I asked the DIA as well - their reply is below:

Yes. However an easy unsubscribe facility that is compliant with the Act would be an email signature with the wording similar to “to unsubscribe, please reply to this message and type unsubscribe in the subject line”.

Also, depending on the relationship, you could look at the exemptions to a commercial electronic message contained in section 6(b). They may also apply.

Ah! Section 6(b) - I had to thank the team at the DIA for making me remember the definitions of when an email is NOT commercial and thus an unsubscribe facility is not required. Below are the definitions of email content that is not considered commercial:

(i) provides a quote or estimate for the supply of goods or services if that quote or estimate was requested by the recipient; or

(ii) facilitates, completes, or confirms a commercial transaction that the recipient previously agreed to enter into with the person who authorised the sending of the message; or

(iii) provides warranty information, product recall information, or safety or security information about goods or services used or purchased by the recipient; or

(iv) provides notification of factual information about a subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship involving the ongoing purchase or use by the recipient of goods or services offered by the person who authorised the sending of the message, or the recipients ongoing subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship; or

(v) provides information directly related to an employment relationship or related benefit plan in which the recipient is currently involved, participating, or enrolled; or

(vi) delivers goods or services, including product updates or upgrades, that the recipient is entitled to receive under the terms of a transaction that the recipient has previously entered into with the person who authorised the sending of the message; or

(vii) provides the recipient with information about goods or services offered or supplied by—

(A) a government body; or

(B) a court or tribunal; or

(viii) has any other purpose set out in the regulations.