Council for Responsible Email Resolutions

M\S Database Marketing recently attended the Direct Marketing Associations Net.Marketing Conference in Seattle. We were overwhelmed by the number of new businesses offering some type of email service including email list rental, distribution services, multi-media email or CRM through email. Clearly email marketing has hit its stride, but it could easily stumble unless consumers and business are protected from unscrupulous and abusive email practices.

While in Seattle, The Council for Responsible E-mail (CRE) passed a resolution calling for guidelines in direct marketing email. The guidelines consist of six separate resolutions to protect consumers and businesses alike. The resolutions are designed to safeguard receivers from getting consistently unwanted, erroneously labeled, or intentionally deceptive e-mail.

They are as follows:

* The CRE agrees that marketers must not falsify the senders domain name or use a non-responsive IP address without implied permission from the recipient or transferred permission from the marketer.

* The CRE agrees that marketers must not purposely falsify the content of the subject line or mislead readers from the content of the email message.

* The CRE agrees that all bulk email marketing messages must include an option for the recipient to unsubscribe(be removed from list) from receiving future messages from the sender, list owner, or list manager.

* The CRE agrees that marketers must inform the respondent at the time of online collection of the email address for what marketing purpose the respondents email address will be used.

* The CRE agrees that marketers must not harvest email addresses with the intent to send bulk unsolicited commercial email without consumers knowledge or consent. (Harvest is defined as compiling or stealing email addresses through anonymous collection procedures such as via a Web spider, through chat rooms, or other publicly displayed areas listing personal or business email addresses.)

* The CRE opposes sending bulk unsolicited commercial email to an email address without a prior business or personal relationship. (Business or personal relationship is defined as any previous recipient-initiated correspondence,transaction activity, customer service activity, third party permission use, or proven offline contact.)

M\S Database Marketing fully supports these resolutions and is proud to state that we have always adhered to these practices for ourselves and our clients.

About the Author

Kevin Burke.

DBMarkets@aol.com
http://www.msdbm.com