E-Mail Marketing’s Mayor, Mike

29/01/2003

You may want to double check that you’re really sending to an opt-in list, lest the courts declare you aren’t.

This week, a Manhattan Supreme Court found MonsterHut guilty of sending over 500 million unsolicited commercial e-mails since January 2001. According to an article on atnewyork.com by Brian Morrissey, MonsterHut misrepresented its e-mails as opt-in and failed to honor at least 750,000 unsubscribe requests.

“MonsterHut argued that its e-mail messages were opt-in,” writes Morrissey, “since it believed the third-party list providers it bought the addresses from had gotten consumers’ consent to receive marketing messages.”

The defense didn’t hold up in court, and each legal victory is making prosecutors all the more willing and eager to go after spammers. Companies that aren’t sure about the quality of their e-mail lists need to do their homework.

NetCreations President Michael Mayor says it’s all too common for respectable, established companies to be oblivious to e-mail marketing best practices. Mayor is making progress in changing that, most recently by spearheading the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) E-Mail Committee. Since the mid-90s, he’s been leading by example. (segue)

By David Berkowitz