Here we are, with almost 20 years of Internet connectivity and business experience, and apparently there are companies that not only don’t have much appreciation of how to do even the basic online business but apparently don’t much care!
Here we are, with almost 20 years of Internet connectivity and business experience, and apparently there are companies that not only don’t have much appreciation of how to do even the basic online business but apparently don’t much care.
What has engaged my ire was an email from HorseLoverZ.com and here’s the problem: I am not a horse rider. I’ve tried it, it was fun, but way too time consuming for me and, frankly, too hard to become really good at given my advanced age.
Nope, messages from the likes of HorseLoverZ are the province of my soon to be ex-wife and now that we are parting ways I need to get rid of such communications cluttering up my inbox.
Now the From: address in the message was email@horseloverz.com but the banner embedded in the message touted both HorseLoverZ.com and the American Competitive Trail Horse Association (ACTHA). Indeed, much of the content was ACTHA’s so exactly who was responsible for the message was unclear if you weren’t paying attention to the sender’s address.
So, when you get an email message from some company that you no longer want to hear from, what do you look for? Exactly; unsubscribe instructions as required by the CAN SPAM Act.
Compliance with CAN SPAM isn’t hard; you merely need to ensure that you follow a few basic and simple rules (see the footnote below).
The problem is that as simple as these rules are a) many small business aren’t aware of them, b) even if they are, apparently you can’t make these rules simple enough to be understood by everyone, c) even if they are aware of the rules it appears many small businesses just ignore them, and d) the FTC does a really crappy job of enforcing the rules unless the violations are on a biblical scale and even then, the term “swift” doesn’t apply to the FTC’s actions.
Be that as it may, the message I got from HorseLoverZ was, despite a logo at the end of the message proclaiming it to be CAN SPAM complaint, essentially in violation of the provision requiring that the sender provides “a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you.” What the message said at the end of the text was “This email was NOT sent by ACTHA. Please contact HorseLoverz should you wish to unsubscribe.”
I went to the HorseLoverz site and was there a clear way to unsubscribe from anything? Of course not! In the end all you could do was use their generic contact form to request that they remove you from their list.
Rather than roll the dice that making this request would work I called their customer service and while the lady I spoke to took my email address and said she would unsubscribe me she obviously wasn’t that interested and my pointing out that they weren’t actually CAN SPAM compliant wasn’t greeted with any kind of interest … in fact, the CSR in essence hung up on me!
Now, I would hope that the management of HorseLoverz and ACTHA would care that they were doing something that if it isn’t technically illegal (which I think it is), is definitely naïve and bad for the image of both of their brands.
So, here’s my question to you: Have you considered how you handle unsubscribes in your email communications? Is your handling really CAN SPAM compliant? And, even more important, is it so badly implemented that someone will write a column about how poorly thought out your business practices are?
Footnote: CAN SPAM Act Guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission:
1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.
