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Posted below are the 2 eZine articles from Christopher Knight regarding TRUSTe's new seal program.
TRUSTe launched a new program this week that is designed to be an email privacy seal that says confidently, "WE DON'T SPAM." In other news, I launched a new weight loss seal that says confidentially, "WE DON'T EAT SPAM." As you can tell from my sarcasm, I am not overly amused by TRUSTe's newest invention, but let's shake off that silly face and explore what lessons we can pull out of their announcement this week. Fran Maier, the executive director and president of TRUSTe said in their press release that: "A survey last month found that two-thirds of Internet shoppers decided not to register with a website because the privacy policy was too complicated or unclear. This marks a difficult and worsening situation for businesses that rely on trusted digital communication...Companies need a way to declare simply, clearly and believably 'we don't spam.' Our seal lets them say that with confidence and consumers now can trust they won't be receiving unwanted email from these companies." Ahh ha! I knew there was a nugget in here to give you. Quick, go check out your posted privacy policy. Is it 5 pages long? If it is, you may have a problem. Don't have a privacy policy? Are you serious? Get one up today... but use simply, clean and short language to get to the point and sell confidence that you won't abuse your new potential list member's privacy. It would be good to see a research report in 6 months from now that was not paid for by TRUSTe, as to whether their seal has any market value as perceived by consumers... better yet, if it actually statistically improved new subscriptions vs. without the seal. One good thing going for TRUSTe is that they have Return Path setup as an exclusive reseller of this new email privacy seal. TRUSTe provides certification, monitoring and oversight for Return Path's Bonded Sender Program. I don't know if this sounds weird or not, but I trust Return Path more than TRUSTe, ...mostly because TRUSTe is in the business of licensing reputation for a hefty fee. They are continually having to watch the relationship between how much money they can take in vs. how much slack they allow email privacy seal holders that violate their ruleset. For TRUSTe's sake, I hope they hold their clients to the ruleset very closely...but they will always be at odds of wanting or needing the recurring revenue from their clients ...and clients that don't receive slack if there are any program infringements won't renew for future annual email privacy seal fees. According to TRUSTE's website, participants in their email seal program must meet the following requirements:
Why Pay TRUSTe Big Bucks For This Email Privacy Seal? It's all about boosting your subscription rate. According to their price chart, they have an application fee that ranges from $450 to $1,875 and an annual license fee of $1,000 to $15,200 depending on your annualized revenues and assuming you have a single brand. If you have multiple brands, it could cost you up to $88,000! My Email Privacy Seal Recommendation: If you have more than 1 million visitors a month coming to your website and/or more than a few million in annualized sales/revenues, it may be worth a test to apply for the new TRUSTe email privacy seal. The test that you are evaluating is whether or not it increases subscriptions vs. not having it, and if the increased subscription rate justifies the hefty annual seal fee. If you have less than a million unique visitors or less than a million dollars in annual revenue, in my opinion, you don't have enough web traffic or revenue flow to make a statistical difference to warrant the effort to acquire the seal. This Ezine-Tip was submitted By Christopher Knight -- Email List Marketing Expert, author and entrepreneur. Get your weekly dose of Email newsletter publishing, marketing, promotion, management, email-etiquette, email usability and deliverability tips by joining the free Ezine-Tips newsletter: http://Ezine-Tips.com/
======Follow-up Article====================
First, read the article (ABOVE) that started this thread: New Email Privacy Seal Program From TRUSTe - Should Ezine Publishers Care? Then, take a look at one of the responses I received from an Ezine-Tips member: (who asked me to not release his name) TRUSTe's Privacy Seal simply looks like another way to market Return Path's Bonded Sender program with a couple of tweaks so it doesn't look so obvious. For a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving consumers from unscrupulous marketers, TRUSTe's relationship with Return Path seems too incestuous. Return Path pays TRUSTe to supposedly "monitor" the Bonded Sender service. TRUSTe turns around and sets up a "privacy seal" that sounds an awful lot like Bonded Sender and gives Return Path the exclusive right to market it. Isn't there something wrong with this picture??? Unfortunately, your suggestion to test this program for companies with email lists over 1 million just plays into their hands even more. You're encouraging your readers to pay TRUSTe and Return Path for this privacy seal and then see if their subscription rates go up. If we assume the privacy seal is ignored by 100% of prospective subscribers, I'll bet you that half of your readers' subscription rates will increase while rates for the other half will decrease. That will leave half of your subscribers thinking that the privacy seal is what made their subscription rate increase and they will continue to throw good money after bad. If one offers an e-newsletter that provides value to one's subscribers while earning money for the publisher, you are certainly not going to "kill the goose that laid the golden egg" by spamming your subscribers and risking their ire and/or defection. If publishers wanted to send spam, they would not need to spend all of their hard work, time, and money to build a subscriber base for spamming. For almost no money, CDs with millions of email addresses are readily available. The fact is that newsletter publishers are as far on the other end of the spectrum from spammers as possible and prospective subscribers understand this. TRUSTe's privacy seal is a costly and shameless solution to a problem that does not exist. I would hope that your readers are smart enough to know that this "Emperor has no clothes." And if TRUSTe wants to regain any of its credibility, it should close this program before it even gets off the ground. Fran Maier, Executive Director of TRUSTe responds: "Matt Blumberg sent to me the comments from a reader regarding TRUSTe’s Email Privacy Seal and of course read your column and some comments yesterday about the Email Privacy Seal, and wanted to set the record straight on what it is we're trying to accomplish. In particular, the reader’s comments call into question the independence of TRUSTe with regard the Email Privacy Seal program and suggest there is something funny in our relationship with Return Path. TRUSTe’s competencies lie in developing strict, objective standards and objective processes for monitoring and enforcement which are not available in such transparent detail, anywhere else in the marketplace. The advance of our mission to deliver increasing protections for consumers and convert more businesses to better standards of conduct, in the case of email, also requires technology expertise which Return Path, among others, can provide. As a partner in either Bonded Sender or the Email Privacy Seal, Return Path brings an excellent reputation for permission marketing and building a base of good practices to increase deliverability. It makes sense for us to join forces to distinguish good emailers for the hard work they put into consumer-friendly practices. Our exclusivity period with Return Path is finite, but we are excited to be able to not only rely on Return Path, but also DoubleClick, to help ramp up these pro-consumer standards in marketplace as quickly as possible. I also would like to reinforce the significant substance of the standards, monitoring and oversight not to mention the value to consumers. I suspect many of the marketers reading this will recognize themselves among those individuals that really do want to increase protection of their customer data but find an overwhelming institutional inertia to change. Many marketers happily exploit and resist removing the barriers to consumer insight into their true data practices. TRUSTe is uniquely positioned to incent companies to improve and disclose their practices. Once you have actually been certified, we welcome your feedback - both on how the processes help improve internal visibility into your emailing practices, and also how it does or doesn't help increase registration rates. We expect to see variability and an adoption/recognition curve, but in our experience, everyone benefits when companies rise to the challenge of meeting third party standards, communicate more clearly with customers, and provide them with dispute resolution. We intentionally designed the Email Seal program to make it easy for companies to become accredited for either or both programs, but the value they provide is very different. Bonded Sender is B2B without visibility to the consumer, and the value lies in deliverability - where we’ve established a 22% increase. The Email Privacy Seal adds a layer of consumer disclosures and a stricter permission standard for 3rd party sharing as opt-in, to meet consumer expectations. In limited pre-release testing we saw a 7% registration lift for newsletter publisher AskMen.com. We fully expect that companies who use both programs will enjoy much improved email campaign performance. I encourage any Ezine to take a look at the substance of the program and decide for themselves whether its important to your employees, customers, management, shareholders, partners or ISPs to be able to prove affirmatively and confidently, that you don't spam." Fran Maier Thanks Fran for setting the record straight. I'm sure our subscribers appreciate your insights. In the meantime, if any Ezine-Tips subscriber does end up testing the new TRUSTe program *and* gets any significant bump in new subscribers due to the seal...please let me know and I'd love to do a case study for all to learn from. This Ezine-Tip was submitted By Christopher Knight -- Email List Marketing Expert, author and entrepreneur. Get your weekly dose of Email newsletter publishing, marketing, promotion, management, email-etiquette, email usability and deliverability tips by joining the free Ezine-Tips newsletter: http://Ezine-Tips.com/ ===================================== Pivotal Veracity Tip: |