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Today's view

By Sarah Collin, CACI Associate Director

Opt-in options

We are seeing an increasing number of companies selling consumer email addresses. To a marketer this is great news; they can now infill their data and communicate to customers and / or prospects online quickly and cheaply. However, in so many cases the end results aren't quite as planned.

A sizable amount of email data is currently being sourced from less than reputable sources outside the EU. Recently, the ASA adjudicated on third-party email marketing lists. The company Moviechoices.com had purchased a list of 216,000 email addresses from a liquidated company. Moviechoices.com had been given the impression that these email addresses had third party opt-ins, which in fact was not the case. The ASA said the database had been purchased in good faith, and that it is the responsibility of marketers to ensure that consent is provided to the permission-holder in the first instance.

As a marketer, one of the most important things to check when purchasing email addresses, either as prospect data or to append to your customer database, is the source of the data. All legitimate providers will be able to give you this information, show you the wording of how the permission was captured, prove to you that the data owners have agreed for their details to be used for those purposes and also that the data actually exists.

Cheap data is not always value for money. How many times have you heard stories where marketers have bought thousands of email addresses for a few dollars, only to end up with endless bouncebacks? Before you commit to buying email addresses get some guarantees on the volume of live email addresses you should expect.

CACI's eAppend pools data from carefully selected data owners. We have created a database of several million consumer e-mail addresses with associated postal address. All data is fully opted-in and compliant with current data protection regulations. But, most importantly, we only supply e-mail addresses where the consumer is already a customer of the company. As an additional safeguard we also e-mail the customer first asking if they would be happy to receive e-mail communications from that company.

Using data that has been collected or collated outside the EU, where the laws are very different or where data has been offered but never seems to materialise, can lead to companies burning their fingers on this legal hot potato!