Is your email newsletter spam?

If you're worried your email newsletter might be caught by anti-spam legislation, then you're not doing it right.

With the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill due to be reported back to Parliament this month, many New Zealand businesses have expressed concern their email newsletters may become illegal.

Yes – that's possible (see Spam Law Could Bite Smaller Businesses by intellectual property law specialist Michael Battersby)

If you find it applies to what you're doing now, then you are definitely going the wrong way about using email as a communication or marketing method.

It should not take formal legislation to ensure New Zealand businesses follow international best-practice. But everyone knows that's not the case.

Here's a selection of the kind of practice which I hope the Select Committee will specifically outlaw in the final Bill (I have asked the Marketing Association to include these situations in its submission):

• You attend a business function. You swap business cards with a new networking contact. A few weeks later, their email newsletter arrives in your Inbox. You didn't ask for it or agree to receive it.

• You join an organisation. The committee helpfully supplies a membership list with contact details for the information of members. You get even more email newsletters.

• Your email address is well-known. It is published on your website and you are in numerous address books. People who need to contact you sometimes just guess the address (correctly) — and so do those who think you should receive their newsletters.

In none of those situations did you ask or agree to receive a newsletter. In marketing-speak, there was no "opt-in".

The new law aims to prevent unsolicited commercial email by requiring businesses to demonstrate recipients have requested or consented to be on a distribution list.

Regardless of the legal requirements, sending material which has not been requested makes no sense from a communications or marketing perspective.

Businesses which send communications to people who have not expressed an interest are hurting themselves. Not only is the audience much less likely to respond, they may regard the sender in the same light as others who regularly clog their Inboxes.

How do you protect your reputation and get them to "opt-in"? By offering them something which they see as valuable and relevant.

Usually that is information — advice, tips, background detail, discussion papers — offered free when the recipient subscribes to the newsletter.

If you follow a similar pattern in building your distribution list, you will reach only those who are genuinely interested while avoiding the "collateral damage" to your reputation which results from including those who are not interested.

This requires some thought and effort to develop and sustain. It is an investment in developing relationships with tomorrow's clients and customers by using the knowledge and expertise held within the business.

Email newsletter audiences created by such information offers demonstrate better response, conversion and unsubscribe rates, and the newsletter is more likely to be forwarded with a recommendation.

One of the most valuable marketing assets a business can own is a distribution list comprised only of people who have asked to be on it.

It puzzles me why businesses would even consider diluting this value by including recipients whose interest has not been confirmed.

Perhaps one of the unintended spin-offs from the anti-spam law will be improved communication and greater marketing effectiveness.