• by Paul Gough , January 2, 2004

What's the best way to work within the new federal Can-Spam law that took effect Thursday? Most experts say that the way to avoid trouble is to keep doing what legitimate email marketers have always done - adhering to best practices and focusing on the value to the consumer. One of the surest ways of getting in trouble is to spend more time thinking about the value to the company - i.e. how cheap it is to send thousands or hundreds of thousands of emails - and not on the recipient, who may or may not be interested in what you have to say.

Jack Lyness, senior vice president of e-agency, an interactive marketing communications agency based in Oakland, Calif., offers some guidelines. They're not elements of the law, he said, but rather good practices to keep from running afoul of Can-Spam:

* Keep records. "We need to document the origin of every address on our lists, preferably including the date and specific form of every 'opt-in,'" he said. The record should be demonstrable, although it may not have to be on paper, as some have suggested.

* Trim lists. "We must be willing, happy, even eager to remove addresses ... and make it easy for our recipients to do so." Lyness said that marketers should be just as vigilant about clearing out bad addresses, which will help agencies better value the good addresses that remain.

* Clearly identify messaging. Everyone on the list should know how the company intends to use the permission that has been granted, which means (among other things) that recipients should know definitively who is sending them email.

* Give fair notice. Every web site needs a carefully and clearly written privacy statement, and everyone needs to live by it.

* Demand effective performance. Emails must perform effectively on all platforms that are likely to receive them. Poorly performing emails are nearly as irritating to recipients who have genuinely opted-in to them as the spam they never volunteered for, Lyness said.