The most common fear voiced when I talk to hotel owners thinking about direct marketing is that they might be accused of “spamming”.
That fear is compounded by the terror of a complaint to the Information Regulator. (The strong arm of the Protection of Private Information Act.)
Fear not. You are more likely to win the lottery than get reported for spam.
This email is inspired by Netforist. They are a superb example of what you can get away with. (This is not a compliment and I am not recommending you follow their practice. My recommendation is delete the unsubscribes as quick as possible. )
I’ll tell you my experience, but I’m far from alone. Search the web and you will find a lot of complaints from frustrated people trying to stop the flow of Netflorist spam.
I used their service for about ten years to send flowers to my Mom. I have used the unsubscribe button a few times for my two email addresses. I have asked many times for personal intervention from their support team. Each time the emails stop. Each time, a few months later, the emails start coming again.
I unsubscribed again last week. Happily, today, I got another sales email.
Trust me when I say that if they are not reported to the Information Regulator, your efforts are more likely to result in silence than in anger or reporting.
The process of reporting to the Information Regulator is not as easy as it should be. (This is a splendid thing if someone threatens you because you emailed them once.)
- The complainant must first ask to be unsubscribed. A few times.
- And then, the complainant must contact the Information Regulator to advise that they are being spammed by your company.
- The Information Regulator will respond to confirm that each submission you make to them must be copied to the other party..
- This gives the offender the chance to take you off their list. Your company is not penalised unless they ignore the Information Regulator.
- That’s the end of your complaint to the Information Regulator. It might solve this one subscribers problem, but not anyone else’s.
Each of subscriber must do this individually to ensure that they stay off your marketing list. That’s not quite what we understood this process to be but its how the process works.
Spamming is not what we should worry about. Never the less dont do it because its simply not effective. What you should be doing is
- building a subscriber list.
- when you capture the details of the subscriber also include a permission box where you state that the subscriber is giving permission to send communication.
- capture some segmentation and continually build that segmentation
- always include an unsubscribe link in your emails
- honor the unsubscribes because pissing off your customer will not get you sales
This is what we should worry about re POPIA:
If there is a data exposure, or your system stops working because of a virus which a staff member introduced into your system by mistake. At this point you must report yourself.
95% of those mistakes come from your staff because they were not trained.
It’s much easier to resolve the Information Regulator side if you can prove that your employees had training. It’s much easier to not have to deal with the Information Regulator at all, if they have training to spot the holes.
If you have any staff who do not yet have training, it’s worth putting in place because its much cheaper and simpler than you think.