www.chinwag.com - uk-netmarketing - roundup

Get this weekly digest, plus other useful info via email. [Subscribe]

When Is An Opt-in Not An Opt-In?
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - June 15, 2001

The word on the street is 'permission marketing'. Pretty much any conference seminar, networking event or overheard conversation will include the phrase. But what constitutes permission? Paper-based direct marketing often asks respondents to tick a box not to receive future promotions (opt-out), whilst most online marketers suggest an opposite policy (opt-in).

Stephen Pratley asked, "I just received a mailing from emailinform.com (a Claritas brand) containing the following text.

'CLICK NOW TO RECEIVE YOUR OFFERS TODAY AND FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EMAILINFORM. Please note that by clicking this link you are agreeing to receive further information from emailinform.com. '

They already have my email address, and permission to send material in the post through another route about 2 years ago. The interesting bit is opting in via just a click, rather than handing over my email address again, or any other information. My question is, what do you consider to be a valid opt-in in the context of a 'permission-based' list like this. Also, what other information should they ask for to determine how they communicate with me in future? I have my own opinions, but I'd like to know what the rest of the list think."

Kevin Rice replied, "...what about 'pre-checked' opt-ins? - you know the kind of thing, when you're on a web page (or html email) and there's a statement saying something along the lines of 'i would like to receive further promotions from XYZ', but the box is already checked? How are these tactics viewed by the world at large (in other words you lot)? opt-in, opt-out... or something else all together?"

Sharing a recent survey his company, Mailtrack carried out, Andrew Petherick wrote, "We ran a survey in conjunction with this very subject last year, which concluded that the Internet industry is opposed to anything which is not opt in. The DMA however endorses an opt-out policy, allowing data to be passed to whoever pays the right money.

[We] conducted a poll of 180 UK ISPs which concluded that 98% of them strongly favour an opt-in policy to the opt-out policy favoured by the DMA. This stance has a groundswell of consumer support from consumers too. Research by NOP reveals that 87% of UK consumers find unsolicited commercial email unacceptable. In contrast, 48% of consumers are willing to actively give their email address to a web site in order to receive targeted advertising on a subject of interest to them."

Ray Taylor summed things up by highlighting the marketing value, "One reason [for the different ethics of marketing online to offline] for this is that there are natural inhibitors to direct mail, for instance, e.g. cost. It may cost 50p per item to send out a mailer, whereas to send an email costs nothing.

But surely the important point here is not so much the ethical issue of to opt-in or to opt-out but the marketing issue of the value of a willing recipient of marketing communication? Or to put it another way, what is the point of making a sales approach to someone who is clearly not interested from the start?

Users can be duped into opting in when really they are not interested. Why? To use and/or to sell lists of 'opt-in' email addresses with all of those usefully ambiguous descriptions such as 'quality', 'targeted', 'permission-marketing' etc., etc. But to the serious, professional marketer, there is no point. Better to engage a single, relevant, interested user than to throw stuff at a thousand email addresses of people who have been hoodwinked into signing up by a deliberately confusing opt-in/opt-out box. For this reason there is no substitute for online retailers and other services compiling and managing their own customer lists for their own use, only. There are no off-the-shelf solutions to this, or any other, marketing conundrum."

Ian Collingwood demonstrated a particularly spaghetti-like piece of data capture, "I saw this piece of opt-out/opt-in lunacy on Vizzavi today and wondered if it represented something new in the field of 'stealth' opt-in marketing. There are two check boxes on Vizzavi's registration page. One of them to opt-out of Vodafone spam, the other to opt-out of third-party spam...

BUT (and here's the cunning bit).... the two checkboxes have completely *opposite* functions. Checking the first one opts you OUT of Vodafone spam. Checking the second one, however, opts you IN to any third party spam that Vodafone's 'partners' see fit to send you... I'll bet that someone, somewhere deep in Vodafone's marketing department thought it would be a *really* clever idea - 'I know...let's TRICK them into letting us send them spam!!'.

Andrew Petherick commented, "I agree - they'll soon find that it will backfire when they end up with a large cumbersome list with no response rates and no value. This defeats every principle of permission marketing."

The definition of the 'permission' in 'permission marketing' is clearly going to become a hot potato, not only for marketers and their representative groups but also the legislators. It's disturbing that the marketing industry has not yet agreed on a common standard as direct email marketing is growing so rapidly. It instils a feeling that the path forward may come from the lawmakers rather than the industry itself.

Netimperative: Is Subscription Working?

The recent announcement from Netimperative that it was going 'paid for' drew a lot of interest from list members. Would the service draw enough members to survive? Would people actually pay for content when push came to shove. Well dotcom downturn came, and apparently so did the members. So far, so good.

Not everyone's impression of the switch to the paid format was entirely positive, Kevin Rice wrote, "... it seems that they've decided it's time to revive the 'subscription model'. Unless you dig around the back of the sofa for £50 (which gets you 6 mths) you can only view news articles posted in the last 24hrs... so no more researching in the Netimperative archive for me! Don't get me wrong, i can understand the pressures that they're under (presumably?), but subscription to an online resource just doesn't do it for me??? - if there was an offline Netimperative mag (for example) I would happily buy it (some smart arse will probably tell me that there is now!!).

Seems a shame, for the last 18 mths my work browser has booted straight to Netimperative, i must have given them thousands of ad impressions in that time (more than £150 worth i would have thought?), but now i head straight for Revolution".

Leslie Bunder replied, "If you find Net Imperative useful as an online resource, surely paying £50 for six months is worth it? Not a lot of money for something that can help you and/or your business... So what exactly do you expect them to do as an online business? Banners don't make the world go round and don't really make money, so the logical move is to charge people for quality content and a resource they can use. If the price is right and people are prepared to pay for it then it should do well, if the price is right and people don't pay for it, well, don't just use it and 'abuse it'.

Seriously, the whole thing about new media is not always about take, take, take, but also at some point 'give' as if we all don't pay for stuff, that stuff will no longer be around for us to use."

In a rather vehement defence, Alex Chudnovsky added, "Well, it COST THEM to provide all that bandwidth to serve your requests. It looks like you were a fairly active visitor, so it cost they a donut to support you. Contrary to what you think ads were covering costs in a select few companies (Yahoo), and that was BEFORE advertising slump. You don't seriously think that they owe YOU for privilege of YOU visiting their site?

I think you don't understand the "pressures". No money in any shape or form for them and many others mean death of the company, IPOs and investors are no longer going to bail out anyone... if you were not adding any value to information they were providing (i.e. copy/paste 'work'), then its not worth for you to pay for this service. On the contrary if you were actually adding some value, then I would imagine this value would be a lot higher than what they are trying to charge."

Kevin Rice responded, "I think that there's really 2 issues for me. Firstly I don't believe that pay-for *only* content is good for the web in the long-term. Many sites started out that way and died/changed their plans years ago (with www.wsj.com as a frequently quoted exception). We all survive on traffic, it's the staple of the web and the more sites that charge for usage the fewer sites users will visit? - if you pay your money you want your money's worth, you're not going to surf around looking at all the other stuff?

Secondly, i didn't like the way in which Netimperative made the switch. I mean Netimperative had done a great job of schmoozing me, hell!.. I even had them as my browser homepage! But then one day (Monday to be precise) I booted up, clicked on a headline... and got stopped at the door? - there was no explanation of why the change was made, no introductory special offer to soften the blow and no summary of all the wonderful new features that my subscription would help to fund? - It was kinda like having a friend say 'we're finished unless you start paying me!' - that left a bad taste in my mouth?

Sure, if you look at an isolated case like Netimperative then £50 for 6 mths probably is good value, but the web can't survive on Netimperative alone. In this thread we've mentioned perhaps 20 online sources of industry info - what if they all switched to a subscription model? Would we sign up to all of them? Could they all survive?

Perhaps Netimperative will say 'yeah, but not enough users were signing up to our pay-for service' - but I've been using Netimperative every day for many months and nobody has ever pitched full membership to me??? (not well enough for me to remember anyway?). I'm quite sure that i could be persuaded to 'go further' and start paying, but not by marching in with the 'freebie police' and taking away the only benefit that Netimperative have so far given me??

So I believe that the way forward is to accept a compromise (if i was a politician i would be... errmm... any of'em?!) - you give some for free (but enough to be valuable and competitive), you sell some advertising (but don't rely purely on it) and you charge for the rest. then it's up to your marketing team to show users why they should upgrade??"

Rob Venes from Netimperative, answered Kevin's query, "I respect your point of view on this, but I do want to clarify something. We didn't suddenly switch over to paid membership without explanation. We ran a campaign asking our users if they would be prepared to pay for membership over a few weeks, and our pledge campaign was covered on the site, on banners and in the national and international press. To the best of our ability, we informed everyone we could that we were considering introducing paid membership, and asked them what they thought. Only after a sufficient number of people had supported the move did we introduce this, and this happened over a considerable period of time.

Frankly, I can't think of how we could have made the move much more explicit. The paid membership model has been in our business model since we launched the company - my signature file for much of last year pointed to the fact that membership was free 'for a limited time only'. And we've never asked anyone to pay up or we don't give you content - we still serve three free daily newsletters and three free weekly newsletters to the industry, with 24 hours of news free on the site. We have two events over the next two weeks that are still far cheaper than pretty much any other company and both are completely free to paid members."

Netimperative's move to subscriptions is being watched by many smaller publishers with interest. Will they make this model work? Time will tell, but there's a lot of regular readers who are keeping their fingers well and truly crossed.

LINKS OF NOTE:
A quick round up of interesting, funny, useful and other links gleaned from the uk-netmarketing list, office gossip and other nefarious sources...we take no responsibility should you chose to click...basically, it's not our fault. Enjoy:

receive uk-netmarketing-roundup by email, every week
Just pop your email address in the form below and receive the uk-netmarketing roundup via email each week. You'll receive an email with details on how to confirm your subscription.

return to top