Question

Topic: E-Marketing

"forward To Friend" With Brokered Lists

Posted by Anonymous on 3/18/2005 at 6:12 PM ET 125 Points
In brokering some lists for our clients we have noticed that many list vendors do not offer a send to friend capability off of their server, and expect our agency or client to host the forward to friend page.

What have your experiences been with this, and does anyone know why this is the case? It seems to me that you would want your initial email and forward to a friend all happening from the same server for tracking and response purposes, rather than building a separate email sending "app" on another server for the few send to friends you may get.

For house lists, or email campaign host has offered this for years but evidently this has not transferred to common practice among the brokered firms.

Thanks for any insight.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by steven.alker on 3/18/2005 at 9:29 PM Accepted
    Hi Jennifer

    In the UK, one of the reasons may be the data protection act, where there are strict limitations on the usage of personal data. There are similar laws in the States. If send-to-a-friend was successful and the names were to get incorporated in the list owners own data, it could raise legal issues concerning the re-use of the data in that the people concerned may not approve.


    More likely, there would be a risk that by having a few referred names in a list, the broker could lose ownership of the whole list and thus lose further revenues from renting or selling it. Of course, this could be avoided if they scrupulously separated out the referrals, but then they might end up having to prove that they had done so! (One referral might already exist in one of their owned lists, for example)


    Likewise, in the UK where we have the email preference service to prevent unwanted email marketing (It’s useless as most spam originates from the USA or Lithuania!) then if the broker hosted the referral addresses, they could be held liable for sending an email to someone who didn’t want to receive one and that’s a £5000 fine over here. Unless you are Lithuanian of course!

    Regards Steve
  • Posted by sammykarij on 3/21/2005 at 6:27 AM Member
    Who wants to risk being accused of spamming? If the mail was to be traced from where it came from it would be definately not from the list owner IP address. Even if if they can escape being convicted of spamming the damage would be sufficient just by being accused of it.

    The benefits are not worth the risk.
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