Believe it or not, CAN-SPAM has actually helped some email marketing businesses to grow. Here's why.
CAN-SPAM -- the first national anti-spam legislation -- went into effect on January 1, 2004. Many marketers were concerned about what its effects would be, and there were numerous companies that left the email marketing space entirely. But, perhaps counter-intuitively to some, CAN-SPAM helped at least this email marketing business really take off.
As recently as this past spring, there were reports that compliance with CAN-SPAM was confounding many email marketers. On the other side of the coin, there have been reports throughout that email users were more fed up than ever and that they trusted commercial email even less than they had before CAN-SPAM went into effect.
Without consumer trust in email, how could CAN-SPAM possibly benefit our email marketing business in any way?
At Datran Media, our revenue has increased far beyond our most aggressive projections in this, CAN-SPAM’s first year, and we point to a few of the legislation’s consequences -- intended and unintended -- as reasons for our growth. And we’re not talking about a small amount of growth. Our emails generated more than 2 million transactions for our clients in Q3 this year, along with more than 20 million clicks. This isn’t a small set of data that we’re making projections from. Our business has more than tripled since CAN-SPAM went into effect.
But why?
Effects of the legislation
CAN-SPAM divided the good guys from the bad guys in email in the United States. Sure, there are still plenty of offshore spammers who can’t be touched by U.S.-based legislation. But, the number of domestic spammers was immediately reduced, so spam was too -- perhaps by 10 percent -- right off the bat.
Many of the U.S. spammers who left the business had taken advantage of illegal open relays. These companies had been essentially taking over users’ hard drives and hijacking their bandwidth to send spam and fraudulent messages with no consent, usually with come-ons for pornography, illegal imported prescription drugs and body part enlargements. These aren’t gone now, but there are fewer of them.
CAN-SPAM effectively made any unsolicited email that came from an unfamiliar brand suddenly become suspect in a user’s inbox. The same idiom that holds true for brand protection in any other kind of advertising or marketing is even more important in email marketing. Think about it: It's no surprise that users are more likely to open an email from a name they have a relationship with. In email marketing, brands matter now more than ever. CAN-SPAM helped make this separation more apparent -- and more transparent -- for both marketers and users.
Companies that weren’t true spammers but who hadn’t invested in meaningful compliance suddenly had to make a business decision. They had to either get out of email marketing altogether or work with a vendor that knew how to make email work the right way for them and for users. This is why some of the vendors who had been working together in various network configurations suddenly stopped. For example, a company as large as Naviant, which had been acquired just a short time before the turn of the year, was essentially dropped altogether by its new parent, Equifax. CAN-SPAM brought considerations of risk management into business decisions for many legitimate marketers, forcing some email marketers to leave the space.
There are other companies whose businesses were impacted by CAN-SPAM. Some essentially got out of the list management business altogether, perhaps due to the aforementioned brand protection axiom. Any email marketer in the list management business has to invest in advanced technology that enables them to send their partner’s emails to consumers in such a way that the emails are seen to be coming from that partner alone. This may seem a simple consideration, but if it were simple then everyone would have been doing it before. Instead, some of the largest players just got out of the business altogether.
In the U.S., our industry has been left with predominantly legitimate marketers working under an umbrella of compliance. Brands and agencies can come to these companies, confident that the way they do business is the right way. We always recommend to our clients and would-be clients that if they have concerns about email and complying with CAN-SPAM, that they probably are right, and that’s why they would be smart to work only with reputable marketers.
Email can still provide tremendous ROI when executed properly. That means, when it’s done within the recommendations outlined in the DMA’s best practices, and also within the proscribed guidelines of the law.
Sean O'Neal is Chief Marketing Officer for Datran Media. He has managed Marketing and Sales for the company virtually since its inception. Over the past 2 ½ years, O'Neal has built out a world-class sales and marketing team.
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