Mark Miller – President – Xplor Western Canada

Hello fellow Xplorers!

I have just returned from the Xplor International conference in Orlando, Florida (Apr 14-16), and while at the conference I participated in a panel discussion with Scott Baker and Nick Romano, led by Dennis Quon on the impact of the new Anti-SPAM Laws (“Tough New Anti-SPAM Laws and Constantly Changing Government Regulations: Who Cares?”). The discussion was great, especially with audience participation which brought out many interesting views. This blog is based on the panel discussion and other sources.

As a summary, the focus of the conference panel discussion was on how new anti-SPAM laws will impact businesses, including:
– what is SPAM?
– what is the impact of SPAM?
– what are the government regulations?
– how serious are the laws (i.e. do they have any “teeth”)?
– what is the cost of implementing Anti-SPAM support?
– who are the biggest sources of SPAM?

What Is SPAM?
The term “SPAM” is often misunderstood and applied to essentially any unwanted communication, primarily email and is normally associated with specific types of email marketing messages (pharmaceuticals, phishing, enhancers, degrees, etc). The actual definition of SPAM however is specifically related to the concept of “consent”, not “content” in marketing messages – i.e. whether the recipient permits the messages to be sent to them. Also – SPAM does not apply to just email, it also covers instant messaging, wiki content, SMS, fax, TV, etc.

As a note – SPAM applies only to advertising or marketing messages, it does not apply to communication from enterprises that have an existing relationship with a customer and their business requires the communication (e.g. a bank sending enrolment confirmations or low balance notifications to a customer does not constitute SPAM).

Estimates on the volume of SPAM email range from 2.4 – 7 trillion messages/year, representing about 70{dea9ef5f0dc871ef9226bb8b0ce00dbc688362be5d75596cdab6734c3777d8ff} of all email delivered.

What is the impact of SPAM?
– The estimated cost of SPAM in 2007 was $13B, including lost productivity and direct cost of resources (network costs, servers, etc). This is a cost that both the consumer and enterprise must bear.
– SPAM discredits email as a trusted form of communication, primarily for business to consumer communication. When a person’s email inbox is 70{dea9ef5f0dc871ef9226bb8b0ce00dbc688362be5d75596cdab6734c3777d8ff} SPAM, they start questioning all email that is delivered.
– while receiving the occasional SPAM message in your company email inbox is an annoyance, having a valid business email message get caught in a SPAM filter can impact business relationships and cause lost revenues based on missed opportunities.

What Are the Government Regulations?
Government regulations vary by country, but there are 36 countries that have anti-SPAM legislation in place, and with the trade partners of Canada and the US the laws are generally similar with the following distinctions:
– The US is the only trade partner that has an “opt-out” based SPAM law, all other partners have “opt-in” legislation. This means that in the US you can send a marketing email message to a recipient in the US as long as you provide an unsubscribe option (and if the person chooses to unsubscribe, you must respect this).
– In all other trade partner countries the “opt-in” law requires that you first get permission from an individual before you can send marketing-related messages.

How Serious are the Laws (i.e. do they have any “teeth”)?
The cost of non-compliance for most countries (esp. in the European Union) is approximately $5K – $10K, depending on how serious the offence is and if the enterprise is cooperative. This has now changed with the new Canadian Anti-SPAM Legislation (CASL) that is currently being phased in. Under the CASL legislation a company can be charged up to $10M, and in March/2015 the Canadian government has charged 3 companies under the CASL law for a total of $1.35M – so yes, these laws do have teeth and companies are now taking them seriously. As a note, the companies that were charged were serious offenders that chose not to cooperate with the government in remediating their customer contact policies and processes and ignored previous warnings. There are many instances where companies have been given warnings by the government, and if they heed the warning and change their systems and policies to comply with anti-SPAM laws they are not charged.

What is the cost of implementing Anti-SPAM support?
The estimated cost for implementing “opt-in” support for complying with the anti-SPAM laws is $30K – $50K. This essentially includes contacting the customer to get consent for delivering marketing messages, and implementing support for unsubscribe processing.

Who are the biggest sources of SPAM?
Often when we think of the source of SPAM, we think of countries with less stringent SPAM laws (e.g. India, China, Russia, etc). In reality, the country that is the top source of SPAM is the USA (representing about 20{dea9ef5f0dc871ef9226bb8b0ce00dbc688362be5d75596cdab6734c3777d8ff} of all SPAM).

A more interesting fact about the source of SPAM is that 80{dea9ef5f0dc871ef9226bb8b0ce00dbc688362be5d75596cdab6734c3777d8ff} of all SPAM is produced by about 100 companies, with the average company size being 3 employees. This means that there are about 300 people generating 5.5 trillion messages/year. If the anti-SPAM laws can focus on these 100 organizations, we could quickly see a very significant reduction in the volume of SPAM.

Summary
The new anti-SPAM laws are impacting businesses, however in general the policies being enforced are often just good customer communication practice. In many cases, following these policies will give you much better success rates with your marketing campaigns since you now know that the recipients are interested in receiving your message.