COMMENT: DMA solicitations guide will help lift bad rap on email

If you work with email as a marketing tool everyday, and have experienced its effectiveness first hand, you would have read with relief recent news that the US Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has finally released a revised set of guidelines for the use of 'commercial solicitations online'.

So what do these guidelines mean? Taking the cautious approach and being careful not to impact the revenues of its members, the guidelines stipulate that emails may be sent to consumers who have given 'affirmative consent' or to those who have 'not chosen to opt-out' when given the option to do so. However, no definition of the term affirmative is provided and it is clear that this approach, staying firmly in the grey area of the permission debate, still falls short of the standards favoured by many privacy advocates.

Aside from mandating the use of permission-based lists, these guidelines establish several other rules of compliance. For example, every promotional email must also disclose the marketer's identity, with an active 'from' and 'reply' email address, and a subject line that should be "honest and not misleading". The commercial solicitation must also provide information for recipients on how to opt out and must give consumers the ability to stop the further sale or rental of their email addresses and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

In addition, the email should either directly or indirectly provide, via a link to the marketers' website, offline contact information for consumer enquiries and complaints, with the marketer's privacy practices prominently displayed, describing the types of PII collected and how it is stored, manipulated and made available for use. While third party verification of the marketer's compliance to these guidelines is optional, the marketer must publicly state that they adhere to the DMA's practices through the use of its logo and seal; repeat violators of the guidelines will be expelled from the association.

To those of us in Asia, these guidelines are nothing new - Hong Kong's Privacy Ordinance has had similar tenets and associated legislative power since early 1996, yet few in the industry could tell you what those guidelines were then, let alone now. With the DMA taking steps to impose self-regulation and formalise what are already generally agreed industry practices and ethics, we should see marketers in Asia paying attention as we so often do when the US speaks. With these boundaries in place, we are still to witness to real success stories of email marketing and customer management in Asia.