IF you’re not in the market for a penis enlarger or a miracle weight-loss pill, opening your email every day and wading through spam can be a chore.
New legislation—the Spam Act 2003—which is now in effect, aims to reduce some of the junk email that is trafficked over phone lines and cables every day, but a question mark hangs over how effective it will really be.
Also, legitimate operators who use email marketing as a means of communicating directly with customers are still in the process of understanding how the legislation will affect them, be it business-to-consumer or business-to-business.
With the Act in place, it is illegal for Australian e-marketers to use unsolicited email. By contrast, in the US, companies can buy lists of email addresses and blast recipients with messages. The only proviso is they must include an opt-out facility.
This is a key point of difference and may actually protect the future of e-marketing in Australia by minimising consumer backlash. In the US, consumers fed up with being bombarded with marketing messages have started to ‘push back’.
More than 63 million consumers—more than half the households in the US—have joined the ‘Don’t Call’ list which forbids contact from marketers.
Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) CEO Rob Edwards—who was instrumental in the implementation of the Spam Act—says consumer pushback is gaining in popularity. These ‘Don’t Call’lists are already in existence in Australia, although not widely known.
“Consumer pushback is a real issue for the industry. The whole future of direct [marketing] will depend on how these channels are used,” Edwards says.
The concern is that the pushback trend could find its way to Australia if e-marketing is not carefully managed.
“That’s quite a legitimate reaction. It’s like putting a ‘no junk mail’ sign on your letterbox. It’s no different really,” Jabmail CEO Stephen Ioannides says.
He believes the Spam Act, which came into effect in April, will limit the cowboys in the industry and promote responsible email marketing best practice, all of which will lessen consumer frustration.
Edwards says the Spam Act has already claimed two scalps, as “two of the major spammers in this country shut up shop”.
However, he admits the reach of the legislation is limited to Australian shores and the majority of spam received here is sent by off-shore spammers such as UScompanies based in locations such as China or Africa. “I think we’ll see a decrease. There’s a lot of effort being put into it. But in one sense it’s almost like shutting the door after the horse has bolted...I think the future [for email marketing] lies in business-to-business,” he says.
ADMA is also creating an Emarketing Code of Practice. Developed by a committee of industry, regulatory and consumer representatives, it will sit alongside the Spam Act and will be binding on all organisations that use email or mobile as a primary form of marketing, as well as third parties who market on behalf of a client.
Providing a more detailed and specific guide to e-marketing, the code will offer significant benefits to companies operating in this sector. It will also help other companies who use email in their business, but aren’t defined as e-marketers, to ensure they act lawfully.
For some e-marketers the Spam Act and code are almost irrelevant. They believe email marketing will evolve past the use of simple emails or HTML text-based communications.
Founding member and CEO of email communications specialist OnlineDM Australia, Paul Anderson believes email marketing will evolve rapidly into other forms of communication.
For example, OnlineDM is currently working on an intelligent screensaver which can be downloaded by customers who consent. The screensaver will automatically update whenever the computer is online. New marketing messages can be sent directly to the consumer without violating spam regulations.
Ioannides says email will give way to more intelligent forms of communication. He says eventually consumer frustration with spam will erode confidence in all email marketing and marketers will be forced to find another way to reach target audiences.
“Email will become, over time, more and more the interface to actual applications that people will use to interact with. Instead of just getting a message or pretty pictures, it will be a more sophisticated type of message… it will be like a website coming to you,” he says.
“And because it knows who you are and potentially—if the database is properly maintained— where you’ve been and what you’ve bought, you can interact with it,” he says.
In the future, Ioannides says there will still be spam as we know it, but it won’t dominate the email traffic as it does today. Instead of making up 76% of all global emails, spam will perhaps make up 30%, with legitimate email marketing making up a significant proportion instead of the tiny amount it does now.
Permission Communications CEO Jeremy Glass envisages a far more effective e-marketing environment because those marketers who employ best practice will have a higher quality email list.
He says marketers that use dodgy lists typically only get a 5% response rate.
He argues that the Act and also the code of practice will force agencies to raise the bar in terms of best practice.
“They will really force marketers to look closely at exactly what it is they’re trying to achieve with email marketing. And it will evolve it from a technology tool used to blast out 10,000 emails into a strategic e-marketing discipline in the same way we’ve seen direct marketing evolve into a discipline over the years,” he says.
