Posted Thursday, November 13, 2008 by
Al Iverson
“We want to build our
list FAST! We want to put a notice on our high-traffic website that says, the first
1000 people to give us the email addresses of ten of their friends will each
receive a $15 coupon code to use on our online store. Is this legal?”
Sure, it’s legal. But that’s the wrong question. Marketing
success takes quite a bit more than just making sure what you want to do is
legal. The right question would be something like: Is it wise? What kind of
problems are you going to have as a result?
From a deliverability perspective, viral marketing campaigns
+ incentives = disaster.
Why?
The perception of spam is a big problem here. The “friends” are going to get
this mail, not recognize that they signed up for it, and they’ll report it as
spam. In a normal “forward to a friend” scenario, the volume is low enough, and
the friend has enough control of the message, to minimize the associated risk.
When you open it up broader, by way of asking for X email addresses, or by
offering an incentive, you’re going to end up with a lot more addresses – bad
addresses. Even if you don’t assume that people will try to game the system by
giving you garbage addresses, the volume increase is the kind of thing that’ll
hurt you, as there’ll be a greater number of spam complaints as a result.
Also – as I’ve blogged about before – any viral marketing program
that utilizes incentives must comply with CAN-SPAM. That means that you have to
make sure you do not send email to any “friend” who may already have
unsubscribed emails from you. If you fail to scrub the submitted addresses
against your internal unsubscribe records means you are failing to comply with
the law. And the affirmative consent standard applies here. Meaning, if you don’t
have affirmative consent from the person you’re emailing (and you won’t), then
you have to label those messages as an advertisement. That’s bad news. That
means you are pretty much labeling your mail as spam, and inviting ISPs to
block it.
Forward-to-a-friend isn’t inherently bad, but it is risky from both the
perspectives of legal compliance and deliverability success. Our recommendation
is that you never offer any sort of incentive for viral marketing or similar
programs, and that you never, ever have a webform that allows people to submit
multiple email addresses.