Re: Is Fogdog's email marketing Wrong?
MARK WELCH WROTE:
> I spent several hours on Tuesday trying to convince
> Fogdog.com that their current "Draft-A-Friend"
> unsolicited commercial email (UCE) campaign is Wrong.
Mark,
I think that you are stuck on the fact that FogDog uses
technology to facilitate a consumer to consumer email
instead of looking at what is actually taking place.
The practice of allowing (assisting) users to email
friends to tell them about a site that they have
visited and liked is not Unsolicited Commercial Email.
I would contend that this is a "friend to friend"
referral - which is the ultimate goal for any marketer.
The Council for Responsible Email (CRE) recently passed
several guidelines for email marketers. One guideline
was: "The CRE opposes sending bulk unsolicited
commercial email to an email address without a prior
business or personal relationship. (Business or
personal relationship is defined as any previous
recipient-initiated correspondence, transaction
activity, customer service activity, third party
permission use, or proven offline contact." In
FogDog's case most/if not all of the "friends"
receiving emails have met this guideline of either
proven offline contact or previous recipient-initiated
contact.
The onus is then on the referee who decides to send
their friends the email. If they abuse this
privilege and refer their friends to obviously too many
sites, then they run the risk of having their friends
delete every email with their name as sender.
Ken Ruck
CMO
Max Networx
Kpruck_at_hotmail.com
Received on Fri Mar 03 2000 - 08:28:27 CST
