Manage E-mail Privacy Across Multiple Channels

With the start of the 2005, the Can Spam Act reaches its one year anniversary. As the year unfolds, it’s especially important to make sure your multichannel business is compliant. Bennie Smith, chief privacy officer at DoubleClick, offers the following tips on how to unify your e-mail campaigns and protect your customers’ privacy.

- All e-mail communication to customers should be presented in a clear, consistent and standard fashion. This includes standardizing e-mail subject lines, headers and footers. Your e-mails need to clearly designate they are an advertisement or solicitation, as well as provide functional opt-out mechanisms, says Smith.

- Multiple e-mail marketing databases of opt-in and opt-out recipients should be avoided.”One master database can simplify compliance while reducing your chance of mistakes,” notes Smith.

- All Web-based pages for opt-ins/outs should be standardized across product lines. “By pointing all pages to a common destination, you provide your customers and visitors with consistent options,” says Smith. This practice also carries the added benefit of making it simpler to reconcile non-Web opt-ins and opt-outs, such as phone and mail, with your master database.