Yesterday I attended the Privacy session at the Email Insider Summit in Florida.

One of the key points that I took away from this presentation was an offshoot of a point raised by Return Path’s Tom Bartel. Now we all know that in order to comply with legislation we need to publish our Privacy Policy and state within this policy what we will be doing with the data we collect and Best Practise advocates that that we link to the policy at the point of subscription. All well and good. But who actually reads the Privacy Policy?

The answer…very few. So, on one hand this is good right? Because it allows us to put the typical 3rd party rental disclaimer in easily and no one’s the wiser right? Well…I guess so…but what kind of list are you growing? Is it a good quality list full of addresses which want to receive offers from 3rd parties?..or is it a list which is full of addresses who are not aware that they will be receiving 3rd party offers and are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button as soon as they recieve an offer? If it is the latter, what value is this?

If your aim is to grow a good quality list then you need to be transparent and let your subscriber know what they’re signing up for at the point of subcription..easily and obviously. So, if your aim is to share the data with 3rd parties, then ask them to opt-in to receive them, which means offering an empty checkbox with a clear and obvious option for them to select rather than a pre-ticked checkbox with some confusing text. This then will give you a better quality, more valuable database.

And if you’re not going to share the data with 3rd parties -then proclaim it! Again- be transparent!! Have a disclaimer alongside of the form which states clearly that you will not be sharing the data with 3rd parties…This in turn will reassure the subscriber and very likely increase your subscriptions.