I was asked an interesting question this week in an interview for an Australian Publication, Marketing Magazine. They asked: "In your opinion, has the tightening of laws and regulations around email marketing been beneficial or detrimental to the industry? Why?"

Hmmm…where to begin? I believe it has been totally beneficial – but not for the reasons you may suspect. The actual problem of spam isn’t caused by legitimate marketers and as such the real spam issue can’t be resolved by tightening legislation. A recent consumer survey was conducted by Q Interactive, which revealed that consumers’ definition of spam varies greatly with that of legislation…it seems to have evolved from being ‘unsolicited’ to ‘unwanted’ emails. That said however, I believe legislation serves another purpose – which is to force marketers to continually look at their email marketing practices and find ways to improve so that their efforts are not only not unsolicited but are actually wanted.

Consumers are becoming less tolerant of irrelevant offers – not just in email marketing but in all areas of direct marketing. As a marketing medium, email is brilliant and allows you to segment and target so that you are able to send relevant emails. Without legislation, marketers could very well still be sending untargeted, irrelevant offers and therefore not be achieving the excellent ROI that email campaigns achieve today. The e-consultancy/Adestra’s Email Marketing Census 2008 reveals that email is rated as the second best channel for ROI after SEO. Therefore I believe the introduction of legislation has refined email marketing and helped to make it the successful marketing channel it is today.

Kath Pay, Managing Director, Ezemail