• by editor , David Baker , June 5, 2006

I had some interesting discussions with Chris Baggot and Chip House of ExactTarget the other day, and they forwarded me an article on "Enterprise E-mail Control & Compliance." It spurred thoughts and validated some ideas about how people are applying governance to e-mail across their organization. Does anyone have global control over all the e-mails generated and distributed across your enterprise (sales, marketing, call center, HR, System, web systems/events)?

Chris and Chip illustrated the following:

"How do you empower those closest to the customer to build better relationships while making sure that best practices and standards are adhered to? With corporate governance in the spotlight, it is wise to pay attention to all outbound e-mail for any risk and exposure it could potentially present to your organization or brand. This is especially true if you work in a regulated industry, such as pharmaceuticals or financial services, in which laws govern what your employees can and cannot say, to whom and at what time. The reality is that all organizations face potential liability for poor practices that affect legal compliance as well as simple marketing best practices."

Not many have spoken much about governance since the CAN-SPAM Act, but it has added a new dimension to our worlds when all departments manage a different messaging subsystem, use separate IP Addresses and are trying to manage complaints and deliverability with ISPs. You may not think it's an issue, but control can be a double-edged sword, and quadruple the cost of ownership as support costs increase.

Chris and Chip wrote in their article, "To address the complexities of creating consistent and compliant e-mail, organizations should strive for an integrated approach that focuses on three things:

Brand integrity. Set up parameters for business units, such as whether they may create their own e-mails or use only preapproved templates, and whether they are allowed to use their own photos. Provide completed e-mail templates that can be customized by business units yet still maintain the branding. Use an e-mail service provider that allows you to easily personalize and send e-mails on behalf of your sales reps, storeowners or franchisees.

Subscriber management. Adopt flawless subscriber management practices. Even large organizations are mandated by CAN-SPAM to honor 'unsubscribes' enterprise-wide within 10 days. The best way to do so is to provide a local unsubscribe list for each business unit, as well as an enterprise-wide master unsubscribe list. Limit access to subscriber databases by publishing segmented groups to business units. Create a profile attribute map and then lock this map so individual business units cannot modify data or delete subscribers. However, give subscribers the ability to modify their own profiles. Also, I recommend locking the business unit 'from' field to protect your organization against a business unit misrepresenting itself, and setting a limit to the number of e-mails a group can send within a period of time.

Enterprise governance. Give control and auditing features to administrators to ensure that subscribers, profiles and e-mail are being used as intended. The things administrators will want to manage include:

The number of times individual business units access their account.

The total number of e-mails sent and delivered for each business unit and the enterprise.

The number of subscriber import and export jobs. List upload failures (due to invalid addresses, expired domains or spam-trap addresses).

The amount of potential spam triggers found in e-mail content."

While these are great high-level tips to consider, what does it mean to your business when you have many systems, many owners and many different issues? According to the Exacttarget team, it starts with consolidation of systems Into a common subsystem. The complexity of the systems provided by the many e-mail service providers has grown over the last few years. So too has their ability to be nimble in working with organizations to fit "point solutions" for triggered mail programs, marketing messages, managed systems for disparate product and sales groups, as well as adding value to your web and call center messaging systems.

It's not always as easy to implement this, but it has become more manageable to assess the value, as the costs will mount over time.

Thanks to the ExactTarget team for this article/case study they shared; if you'd like a copy, e-mail me at dbaker@agency.com and I'll have them send you one.