Oct
24
The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
Filed Under CyberLaw, Email Marketing | Leave a Comment
Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.
Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.
Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:
- Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
- Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
- Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
- Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
- Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
- Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
- Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.
Need more information? http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-Compliance-Guide-for-Business
Sep
28
The Unique Selling Proposition (also Unique Selling Point or USP) is a marketing concept that was first proposed as a theory to explain a pattern among successful advertising campaigns of the early 1940s. It states that such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer and that this convinced them to switch brands….Define Your Uniqueness – Just as the name suggests, a “unique” selling proposition must explain how your company or offer is unique…Be Specific – I once landed on a website that presented the following USP at the top of every page. See if you can guess what type of business it was…Keep It Short – USPs are not introductory paragraphs. They are generally a short sentence or two. Don’t ramble. The more concise you are, the better your results will be…When you mention the word “branding” most people automatically think of USP (unique selling proposition). The overall and incorrect perception of a brand is that it simply consists of the statement you use to define what you do. Slap your USP on every advertising piece that goes out the door and tam dash you’re branded! Not even close…Your brand is created from every single thing you do within your business. Your brand is the all-encompassing collection of business principles, business..strategy, sales, customer relations, appearance, attitude, products, services, advertising, copywriting, Web site design, brochures your entire company…In order to create a brand that has “staying power”, it must go several levels deep. Consider the Walt Disney Company for a moment. What comes to mind when you think of Walt Disney? Most likely Mickey is first, maybe animated movies, then family-oriented, wholesome, quality, etc. Is all of that just a USP? Definitely not!… The USP is a tactic..The unique selling proposition should not be confused with a positioning statement. The USP is just what it says – a sales proposition that no one else is promoting at the time. It’s a short-range competitive tactic. It may take competitors quite some time to discover that a particular USP is helping a marketer boost market share, and another little while to counteract that USP with an offering that’s even more attractive. Devising and broadcasting a new theme (USP) is done very well by most advertising agencies. I’m of the opinion that that’s the only value provided by today’s agency. (That’s the subject for another post rater.) A USP is not a slogan, a mission statement, or a catch- cry. These may have their place within a business but they are not a USP.If you break the term into its parts, you get a good idea of what a USP is really all about.A USP is a proposition you make to your market.Not only that, it’s one directed at generating a response, an action, a sale. It’s a selling proposition.And not only that, it’s a selling proposition that no other competitor makes. It’s unique.The idea first came from Rosser Reeves, an advertising copywriter for Ted Bates & Co. Reeves introduced it in a book written in 1961…”Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: ‘Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.’The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique, either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions; i.e., pull over new customers to your product.”How Do You Create A USP?Nobody has ever described how to create a USP. So we had to create the process ourselves…For starters, we don’t think you ‘create’ a USP at all. Not a USP that’s worth anything, anyway…We think you ‘derive’ it…Strategy and Action see USP Derivation as revolving around a key question…..What does your market want… which your competitors are not adequately addressing… and which you could deliver?..If you have the answer to that, you have identified a gap in the market. It might not be a actual gap in terms of product performance or service delivery by your competitors… but it’s a gap that isn’t being claimed by anyone, or not being claimed strongly…If you break the USP Derivation question up there are three ingredients that will give you the answer… Market Intelligence, Competitor Intelligence and Company Intelligence…Once you have these, you can then apply a derivation process…The Derivation and Writing of a USP..Once we have our three ingredients, we apply a process of gap identification and prioritisation. The key ideas of most strategic and competitive fit are targeted…Then we copywrite the USP and subject it to a unique evaluation process we’ve developed that turns a good idea into a powerful USP…For instance, we appraise the basis of any unqiueness, the specificity of claims, and even the rythm of the wording itself. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) — Your Competitive Advantage
Jul
15
Marketing your new product
Filed Under Business Resources | Leave a Comment
Door-to-door interview your prospect. Then, give a brief introduction about your product.
The more people know about your products;
The more chances for you to generate more sales.
May
16
Internet help boost your business sales
Filed Under Business Resources | Comments Off
My business’s partner. I shared with you one of the most powerful strategies yet to up your business profits and down your expenses (and working hours too) that is to automate your business. Hence, the correct use of the Internet is central to setting up and running a business in a smart and lean way. Even for a brick and mortar business, a Website that is properly set up and used can literally make the difference between profit and loss.
Internet. It’s an amazingly poweful way to keep operational costs low and boost profits. But most businesses have no idea how essential a Website is, or how to use it effectively. Around half of all businesses don’t even have Website. Of the half which does, I’d estimate that about 87% are using it wrongly.
Mar
21
Non-Disclosure Agreement
Filed Under Business Resources | Comments Off
Dear my value client,
Today, Dev raised me a question regarding the Intellectual Property (IP) and Access Permission issue he concerned.
Let me clarify how we respect to your IP.
For all the website and software application we developed. The main idea always come from our customer. We make understanding our client needs, and customized a software application that help assist his business process.
Dev asked “How can i protect and ensure that my website only access by him/his administrator, and block the access from outsider including his Internet Service Provider.
YES, you can fully manage/own your website with the following two steps:
Read more