For once, the red tape is worse elsewhere

Last week we were guests of e-Circle, a German e-mail marketing agency, for one of their seminars at the Institute of
Directors. They put up a good roster of speakers, including their MD Boris Berten talking about how to get the most out of your mailing lists, and David Pool explaining “the seven habits of highly effective digital marketers”.

All in all plenty for us to think about, since we provide the content for many a newsletter. And one of the things that made me sit up was Stephen Groom’s comparison of EU and UK e-mail privacy laws.

Is this one of the areas where EU law is enforced strictly by a bunch of busybodies when it’s implemented in the UK? Do e-mail marketers on the continent have it easy compared to us?

Actually no. Only one successful prosecution has ever been brought against UK e-mailers who’ve failed to get their opt-ins and opt-outs right. The Czechs have brought two successful cases, and France five (awarding over £200,000 damages in the process). Italy has brought fifty, and the Germans, bless ‘em, have brought at least five hundred successful prosecutions.

Here’s the rest of the table, with thanks to Stephen and the folk at www.marketinglaw.co.uk. Figures were correct as at February 2006.

UK 1
Austria 500
Belgium 5
Czech R 2
Denmark 7
France 5
Germany 500
Greece 77
Holland 15
Ireland 1
Italy 50
Malta 0
Portugal 0
Slovakia 15
Spain 50
Sweden 2

David Harbottle

HTML Newsletters and the Email Client

Test, test, and test again. It’s possible that such an adage has never been so fitting as this example is to the sphere of Information Technology. With different systems, assorted architectures and various languages everywhere, it’s not always easy to ensure that consistency prevails.

HTML newsletters, for example, continue to be popular and effective tools for electronic marketing. However, consistent display of your lovingly put together HTML by the numerous email clients out the there is hard to achieve. In fact, it is even less predictable than the way in which web sites are displayed by different web browser platforms.

Consequently, it is always best practice to test the email by sending it to a number of popular email clients, including those which are web based such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, and G-mail. When testing such programs it’s a fair assumption that regional variations need not be tested and if the newsletter is being displayed correctly within yahoo.co.uk, for example, that it will look identical in the inbox of a yahoo.fr user. However, our experience has indicated that this is not the case!

When recently testing an email newsletter for a large cosmetics firm, it was discovered that yahoo.co.uk interprets the html code ™ as expected, displaying the trademark symbol (™). The French version of the same email client, on the other hand, ignored the code completely and displayed no symbol at all. In order to force the client to display the ™ symbol it was necessary to enter the number pad command ALT+0153 whilst editing the html code directly. So, if you thought knocking up an html newsletter for a varied audience would be hassle free then think again!

What can be done then to ensure that all recipients see your article as you intended? A sensible, and widely used, solution is to upload a copy of the newsletter as a web page and offer the recipient the option to view the bulletin in their browser. With so many different email clients to cater for, opting for this method seems the most realistic and efficient solution.

John Scott