An affiliate's email, but your reputation and court costs

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on March 25, 2008

legal symbolA few days ago I wrote about all the other groups potentially messing about with your hard-earned email reputation.

Affiliates promoting your products or services through their own email lists are one of those groups. How they present these offers and how they conduct their email marketing obviously reflects on your business.

But it goes beyond issues of branding and reputation. Under certain circumstances, US anti-spam legislation deems vendors liable for the email actions of those selling on their behalf, e.g. affiliates.

You'll find details on this here. As an affiliate myself, the observed response of merchants to this liability has been one of the following...
  • Ignore the issue
  • Ban affiliates from using email to promote the merchant's products and services (safe, but means watching the poor baby floating along with the bathwater)
  • Ban most affiliates from using email, but allow a few select affiliates with large lists and sound practices to do so
  • Allow any affiliate to promote the merchant's products and services via email, but only after the affiliate agrees to a set of requirements and controls on how they do so
This latter approach came under scrutiny recently when the FTC reached a settlement with affiliate merchant Cyberheat in a Can-Spam related legal case. Cyberheat agreed to implement a fairly rigorous set of controls to ensure they remained compliant with the legislation in terms of what their affiliates were up to.

Anyone whose affiliates use email lists would do well to explore the ramifications of this settlement. These two links will help:

Ken Magill's What the Cyberheat Settlement Means to You
Laura Atkins' Affiliates: what is a company's responsibility?

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[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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