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One Third of Top UK companies are Still Breaking Email Privacy Laws
A new study published by data and marketing specialists CDMS has revealed that 34% of top UK companies are not complying with the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, eighteen months after it became law in the UK in December 2003.
This Europe-wide legislation, which governs email communications with private individuals, demands that companies only send unsolicited sales messages via email to non-customers if they have actively opted-in to receiving them. In practice, this means that whenever someone’s details are recorded — for instance as part of a money-off promotion or a competition — they must be asked whether they want to receive subsequent sales marketing e-messages from that company or any other third party.
This Europe-wide legislation, which governs email communications with private individuals, demands that companies only send unsolicited sales messages via email to non-customers if they have actively opted-in to receiving them. In practice, this means that whenever someone’s details are recorded — for instance as part of a money-off promotion or a competition — they must be asked whether they want to receive subsequent sales marketing e-messages from that company or any other third party.
The legislation makes it crystal clear that simply offering someone the opportunity to opt-out of receiving unsolicited emails (or indeed pre-ticking an opt-in box) does not comply with the Directive.
The CDMS study examined compliance amongst the top 200 companies across thirteen main consumer business sectors — Banking, General Insurance, Credit Card, Building Societies, Publishing, Broadcasting, Retail, Fixed and Mobile Telecoms, FMCG, Mail Order, Utilities and Travel. Companies in each sector were tested to see whether they consistently offered non-customers the opportunity to actively opt-in to further marketing emails when their details were recorded as the result of a promotion or enquiry. These promotions appeared either on the company’s own web site, through a partner company’s website, in a third party e-newsletter, or as part of an advertising or direct mail campaign.
On average, only 64% of companies studied were compliant with the new legislation, despite the law having been in operation for over eighteen months. Ian Hubbard of CDMS comments,
“Experienced marketing directors have recognised and accommodated this restriction on e-marketing in Europe. They put preparations in place that not only ensured immediate compliance from the legislative enforcement day of December 11th 2003, but also developed intelligent offline marketing initiatives (usually direct mail) to fill the gap which was seen to be left by the removal of this prospecting channel. Since enforcement day at the end of 2003, forward-thinking companies have come to view email marketing as almost exclusively a customer management and marketing channel, and have focused their new customer acquisition activity onto traditional media.
Companies who have not complied are putting their carefully built brands at risk, by putting out the message to consumers that they apparently don’t care about legislation designed to protect their prospective customers’ privacy. This effectively puts them in the category of junk emailers.
At the very least, these companies need to put processes in place to stop the rot, and limit their current risk. In addition, there is a major forensic and clean-up job to be done on these companies’ marketing databases.
In effect, each firm has to set up a proper fail-safe permissions section to its contact database to ensure compliance. This can be matched against commercially available opt-in databases to double check whether someone has given permission through another party to receive unsolicited email in the company’s business category. Failure to observe these routines is, quite simply, breaking the law, and the situation will certainly catch up with organisations that do not now sit up and pay attention to the issue.
We would exhort those who have not yet paid full attention to this issue to do so with all speed, before enforcement test cases start to be launched, and before consumer lobby groups (and consumers themselves) blacklist them.”
The CDMS study examined compliance amongst the top 200 companies across thirteen main consumer business sectors — Banking, General Insurance, Credit Card, Building Societies, Publishing, Broadcasting, Retail, Fixed and Mobile Telecoms, FMCG, Mail Order, Utilities and Travel. Companies in each sector were tested to see whether they consistently offered non-customers the opportunity to actively opt-in to further marketing emails when their details were recorded as the result of a promotion or enquiry. These promotions appeared either on the company’s own web site, through a partner company’s website, in a third party e-newsletter, or as part of an advertising or direct mail campaign.
On average, only 64% of companies studied were compliant with the new legislation, despite the law having been in operation for over eighteen months. Ian Hubbard of CDMS comments,
“Experienced marketing directors have recognised and accommodated this restriction on e-marketing in Europe. They put preparations in place that not only ensured immediate compliance from the legislative enforcement day of December 11th 2003, but also developed intelligent offline marketing initiatives (usually direct mail) to fill the gap which was seen to be left by the removal of this prospecting channel. Since enforcement day at the end of 2003, forward-thinking companies have come to view email marketing as almost exclusively a customer management and marketing channel, and have focused their new customer acquisition activity onto traditional media.
Companies who have not complied are putting their carefully built brands at risk, by putting out the message to consumers that they apparently don’t care about legislation designed to protect their prospective customers’ privacy. This effectively puts them in the category of junk emailers.
At the very least, these companies need to put processes in place to stop the rot, and limit their current risk. In addition, there is a major forensic and clean-up job to be done on these companies’ marketing databases.
In effect, each firm has to set up a proper fail-safe permissions section to its contact database to ensure compliance. This can be matched against commercially available opt-in databases to double check whether someone has given permission through another party to receive unsolicited email in the company’s business category. Failure to observe these routines is, quite simply, breaking the law, and the situation will certainly catch up with organisations that do not now sit up and pay attention to the issue.
We would exhort those who have not yet paid full attention to this issue to do so with all speed, before enforcement test cases start to be launched, and before consumer lobby groups (and consumers themselves) blacklist them.”
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