Can Spam Update

According to Ken Magill of Direct Magazine: The Federal Trade Commission yesterday issued four new rules under the Can Spam Act.

For the most part, they don’t have earth-shattering impact on permission-based marketers. And where they do affect marketers, it is mostly positive.

“Overall, the final rules are good news for marketers,” said Tom Bartell, vice president of Return Path’s Sender Score e-mail best-practices certification unit. “Can Spam has set a pretty low baseline in terms of best practices. This kind of rule and general guidance raises the bar and underscores some of what the market’s been doing on top of Can Spam anyway.”

For one, the FTC also said people cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps beyond sending a reply e-mail or visiting a single Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mails from a company.

The FTC also decided not to shorten the time marketers must honor opt-out requests from 10 days to three.

The FTC also modified the definition of “sender” when multiple parties are involved in an e-mail, so they can designate which company will be considered the sender and will have to comply with Can Spam’s requirements by putting its name in the “from” line and its postal address in the body copy.

The FTC also ruled that a post-office box can serve as a legitimate postal return address under the requirements of Can Spam.

Finally, the FTC decided not to give marketers “safe harbor” protecting them from Can Spam violations made by affiliates. The commission has long maintained that marketers are responsible for the actions of affiliates who send e-mail on their behalf.

Sigma Micro Announces SigmaCommerce 4.2

Sigma Micro has announced the upcoming availability of SigmaCommerce 4.2 for a 2008 mid-summer release. New features, functions and benefits focusing mainly on the eStore module include:

PRODUCT RATINGS, REVIEWS, BLOGS
Using Sigma Micro’s new integrated Web 2.0 partner, Last Piece Software, Product Ratings and Reviews will be available for clients to create the online customer loyalty experience that shoppers expect.

DEEP LINK URL CREATION WIZARDS
Deep Link URL Creation Wizards will allow direct retailers to integrate content with commerce for an internet e-mail or keyword marketing strategy. You can also use generated URLs and source codes in other campaign management tools such as Google Adwords, FireClick, or Yahoo! Paid Search.

FEATURED ITEMS CONTROL
The Featured Items Control provides for more automated dynamic merchandising rules to dynamically generate Hot Sellers for the Home Page and Landing Pages relevant to the category page or group page a shopper is navigating.

FRAUD MANAGEMENT CONTROL
With expanded configurability of User-defined holds, retailers can control fraud management by placing an order on hold for credit reasons, bogus addresses, specific countries, or just to monitor an operator.

MULTI-DIVISION BRANDING
SigmaCommerce 4.2 allows retailers to maintain and attach specifically branded documents and communication materials. The new Document Control allows retailers to build unique branding around each product in item detail pages to create a rich media “experience” while providing a quick way to publish return policies, how-to videos, workshops, and instruction sheets. Using the CSS Import Utility, retailers can create and import unique site themes to enhance site ranking in search engines and support shoppers with the experience they expect.

AND MORE
Last Piece Software and other 3rd-party integrations support SigmaCommerce Web 2.0 technologies for Search Engine Optimization and Web analytic tools to help increase retailer conversion statistics.

For more information, see www.sigma-micro.com

USPS, Netflix and the Postage Increase

eKey Technologies has an article by Todd Butler, President of Butler Mailing Services, Inc., that points out an apparent conflict of interest within the Postal Service that I find so outrageous that I decided to mention it here, even though it has nothing to do with direct commerce technology (only by a huge stretch). Perhaps its because when I edited Target Marketing back in the early 80s we spent a lot of time covering the USPS.... In any case, if Todd's posting is true -- and I have no reason to believe it is not -- then the upcoming rate increase (detrimental to direct merchants with catalogs) is due largely to the Postal Service granting unfair and highly questionable favoritism to Netflix in providing manual handling for its non-machinable mailers.

Todd's posting is not that long. I urge you to read it. This issue has been raised publicly before, but not in quite the context of favoritism that Todd has suggested.

Text Mining Helps Gaylord Hotels

Intelligent Enterprise reports that Gaylord Hotels has completed a successful pilot project with the Clarbridge text mining platform.

They previously had a third-party firm reading and categorizing comments about problems and keeping track with tick sheets, but they focused only on which categories received the most comments. With text analytics, they were able to tie comments to structured one-to-five satisfaction rankings, and quickly discovered that their biggest problems were not necessarily related to the most common complaints.

This certainly has Web 2.0 implications, or even for Web 1.0 customer feedback for multi-channel merchants. For details, click HERE.

DMA Sponsoring Web 2.0 Webinar

Did you know that the most frequently used Web 2.0 tool is not the most effective for brand building? Or that the most underutilized Web 2.0 elements are blogs and user generated content?

These and other issues will be covered in a Direct Marketing Association Webinar, “Using New Media — The Link Between DM & Brand,” Wednesday, May 7, from 1 to 2 p.m. covering research on how marketers can use an integrated strategy to accomplish branding and direct marketing.

The session will cover:
- the most effective uses of each type of new media
- which metrics you should use to track and measure your results
- the marketing applications of each technology channel
- ahead-of-the-curve opportunities

Alas, it's not free. Cost is $295 for DMA members and $545 for non-members. Click here to register.

BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services Introduces Vers. 6.0

BEA has released Version 6.0 of its AquaLogic Commerce Services solution, a product designed to help increase online sales, store efficiency and profitability, while providing the flexibility to accommodate growth and help businesses quickly adapt to market changes, the company reports. It adds that the new version simplifies commerce process management, enabling greater revenue opportunities and extends the commerce multiplatform SOA foundation providing increased flexibility.

New features and capabilities of BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services 6.0 include:

* multistore management is made easier with virtual catalogs to simplify store setup and management;
* store revenue enhancement is facilitated by additional support for gift certificates, pre-ordering of products before they are available and taking orders on back-ordered products;
* customer trust and satisfaction can be more easily achieved with additional secure payment integrations;
* simplified order management streamlines order activities and includes enhanced support for returns, exchanges, refunds and split shipments;
* a more responsive Commerce Manager application helps increase productivity and simplifies commerce management for business, call center and order management activities;
* more than 30 new web services have been added to simplify deploying and integrating commerce within a services-based environment;
* supported platforms now include BEA WebLogic Server 10 and BEA WebLogic Portal 10.2;
* enhanced integration with BEA WebLogic Portal includes commerce portlets and integration with the WebLogic Portal virtual content repository, enabling the commerce product catalog items to be used for portal personalization, campaigns and federated searches; and
* improved integration with BEA Workshop simplifies building unified commerce applications that include BEA WebLogic and BEA AquaLogic product family components.

Taylor Corp. to Buy Lillian Vernon

An auction to purchase bankrupt gift cataloger Lillian Vernon Corp. has been won by Taylor Corp., the Mankato, MN-based marketer that owns Current, G. Neil, Paper Direct, and Sa-So catalog titles (with total sales direct sales of about $700 million).

Virginia Beach, VA-based Lillian Vernon, which was purchased by Sun Capital Partners in May 2006, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Feb. 20. Michael D. Muoio, Lillian Vernon’s CEO, reports that the tentative sale must be approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, DE.