• by Chad White , August 7, 2008

Most consumers don't read privacy policies or contest rules or any of the other fine print composed by your email and legal experts. In the absence of reading your carefully crafted legalese, consumers rely pretty much entirely on their past experiences, common sense and perceptions of how things should operate to determine if you're "following the rules." Deviate from these consumer expectations and you'll likely find yourself faced with upset customers and subscribers that opt out of your email program or angrily mark your emails as spam.

Here are four fairly recent cases where I think retailers tried to go counter to consumer expectations with their email programs:

Opting blog commenters into your email program. Last month Bluefly launched a "Caption This Contest" on its blog, inviting readers to create a caption for a picture from the latest episode of "Project Runway" (which Bluefly is a big sponsor of) by commenting on the blog post. While the rules clearly stated that by commenting you were opting into their email program, I'm guessing that many commenters were surprised when they started receiving emails from Bluefly a couple of weeks later without a clear explanation or a reminder of the contest rules. That's my guess for two reasons: (1)Bluefly dropped that email opt-in language from its latest "Caption This Contest" post and (2) consumers aren't used to companies using their email addresses in this manner -- in fact, most blog comment forms promise not to use your email address for anything.

Bluefly might have done better using a confirmed opt-in approach in this case as part of sending either an immediate "Thank you for entering the ‘Caption This Contest'" email or an email several days later notifying them of the winner of the contest.

Opting subscribers of one brand into the emails of sister brands. During the holiday season last year, Old Navy promoted a "Wish it, win it" sweepstakes that gave customers a chance to win everything on their wish list. It was a clever way to incent customers to browse Old Navy's merchandise and create a wish list. However, on the contest entry form, not only was there a pre-checked box opting you into Old Navy's email program, further down the form and buried in a list of preferences there were three pre-check boxes opting you into the email programs of Gap Inc.'s other brands: Banana Republic, Gap and Piperlime.

First, many consumers may not be aware of the connection between these brands. Second, what are the chances that an Old Navy customer is going to want emails from all the other Gap Inc. brands? And third, while there's a strong precedent for using sweeps to acquire email addresses, there's little to no precedent for using sweeps to acquire email addresses across multiple brands simultaneously.

Using the email lists of an acquired brand to build the lists of your other brands. At the end of last year, Norm Thompson was acquired by Orchard Brands, which owns several other retailers. In an email to its subscribers, Norm Thompson announced that "As an extra benefit to you, we will now be sending you offers from our sister companies as well." What the company failed to tell its subscribers was that Orchard owns nine other brands -- Appleseed's, Blair, Draper's & Damon's, Haband, Gold Violin, Sahalie, Solutions, The Tog Shop, and Winter Silks. While it gave readers of that email a chance to click through to an opt-out page for the additional brands, it was all fairly on the sly and evasive.

It's unlikely that consumers would see receiving emails that they didn't request as an "extra benefit." And if they didn't open and read this one email announcing the acquisition, they'd be even more likely to see emails from those sister brands for what they truly were: unsolicited and unwanted. Consumers well understand that email permission grants are between them and the brand, not the company that owns the brand and definitely not to sister brands.

The responsible and respectful way of doing this would have been to give subscribers the option to opt-in to those other emails, using Norm Thompson's emails as a platform to introduce subscribers to these other brands. Norm Thompson could have also highlighted complementary products from these other brands in their emails, or created banners that introduce readers to these other brands and allow them to opt in to those other email programs. That takes some extra effort, but it's a way to demonstrate the value of the other brands' products in a way that's relevant to Norm Thompson's subscribers.

Using email addresses from forward-to-a-friend forms. Last fall I received an email from Sony explaining the benefits of its emails and asking me to opt in. However, I received that email at an address where I'd never been a subscriber but had received a Sony email from a friend who used Sony's send-to-a-friend (STAF) functionality. That forwarded email arrived more than 6 months prior. Sony was very clearly harvesting addresses that their subscribers put into their STAF form -- a big no-no. The email even included completely false statements like "You are receiving this email because of your prior relationship with Sony Electronics." No consumer would believe that receiving a forwarded Sony email from a friend creates a relationship between Sony and the forward recipient.

The proper way to use STAF for email acquisition is to include a subscription link in the topper that you add to forwarded emails. If you feel like you won't be able to resist the temptation to harvest email addresses used in STAF forms, then I recommend that you don't retain those addresses.

Consumers have an increasingly strong sense of how they are supposed to be treated. In many ways they're dictating the evolution of best practices by their unwillingness to accept deviations from the norm that they experience with email as well as with emergent channels like RSS and social networks, where they have complete opt-in and opt-out control.

Have you seen any other examples of email marketers engaging in behavior that's likely to evoke a negative reaction from subscribers or customers?

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