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Best Practices Guide For Email Marketers
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-12-15
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The Email Sender and Provider Coalition (ESPC) just released their "ESPC Best Practices Guide." The book is a list of guidelines that help reinforce the industry best practices for email communications and includes an updated version of the "ESPC Email Marketing Pledge." The guide covers a number of areas including permission, disclosure, address collection, content relevancy, unsubscribe practices and referrals.
"It is important to the email industry as a whole to establish this framework," said Trevor Hughes, executive director of the ESPC. "We need to help regulatory agencies and ISPs enforce legislation and restore consumer trust in email. These guidelines have been embraced by our members, and we look forward to establishing them as industry standards for all senders."
To preserve the viability of email communications in the age of spam and fraudulent scams, mailers should follow a standardized set of regulations and best practices. The Guide is a reference of these practices, designed to improve consumer trust in the email channel and uphold industry best practices for senders.
As part of the process of creating the Guide, a standardized set of permission definitions was developed to provide consistency for reputation systems and international discrepancies in terminology. The ESPC's "Email Marketing Pledge," originally issued in 2003, reflects the new terminology, which is in line with U.S. and E.U. laws.
The Pledge provides a clear path towards distinguishing legitimate uses of email from spam by giving concrete definitions as to what constitutes spam, prior business relationships, informed consent, and various forms of opt-in.
These efforts were spearheaded by the ESPC Receiver Relations Committee under the leadership of StrongMail Systems Inc. and CheetahMail with additional contributions from Topica Inc. Many ESPC members contributed their specialized expertise and insight to create the guidelines.
Often times, legitimate email can be mistaken for spam because sometimes consumers don't realize what they get. It's important to adhere to certain basic rules, like those listed in the best practices book. It can protect those who utilize email for some marketing from certain liability issues and protect the very consumers you're attempting to market too. If those consumers are better protected, they'll be more receptive to your message in the future.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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