The DMA Adopts New E-mail Append Guidelines

NEW YORK, February 25, 2004 - The Direct Marketing Association (The DMA) today announced that its Board of Directors has approved new guidelines for appending e-mail addresses to consumer records. The DMA’s Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice must be adhered to as a condition of membership in the association; unresolved violations place companies at risk of expulsion and attendant publicity.

"E-mail has proven effective as a vehicle for communication between ethical businesses and consumers," said Patricia Faley Kachura, vice president, ethics & consumer affairs, The DMA. "Today we’ve adopted guidelines that outline the appropriate ways to approach consumers in order to establish effective e-mail relationships."

The new guidelines as published in The DMA’s Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice, are as follows:

Definition of e-mail address appending: E-mail address appending is the process of adding a consumer’s e-mail address to that consumer’s record. The e-mail address is obtained by matching those records from the marketer’s database against a third-party database to produce a corresponding e-mail address.

A marketer should append a consumer’s e-mail address to its database only when the consumer gives a marketer permission to add his or her e-mail address to the marketer’s database; or

1. There is an established business relationship with that consumer either online or offline; and
2. The data used in the append process are from sources that provided notice and choice regarding the acceptance of receiving third-party e-mail offers and where the consumer did not opt out; and
3. Reasonable efforts are taken to ensure the appending of accurate e-mail addresses to the corresponding consumer records.

A marketer should not sell, rent, transfer or exchange an appended e-mail address of a consumer unless it first offers notice and choice to the consumer.

All messages to an e-mail appended address should include a notice and choice to continue to communicate via e-mail.

Marketers should have in place appropriate record keeping systems to ensure compliance with these guidelines.

• end of guideline text –

Interviews can be arranged to discuss the new guidelines announced today with Patricia Faley Kachura, vice president, ethics & consumer affairs, The DMA.

Consumers, marketers, members of the press, and government officials concerned about possible ethics violations can alert The DMA by using the Ethics Case Complaint Form at

www.the-dma.org/guidelines/EthicsComplaintForm.pdf

The DMA’s Ethics Publications and Tools can be viewed online at

http://www.the-dma.org/guidelines/quickreference.shtml

The DMA is the leading trade association for businesses interested in interactive and database marketing, with nearly 4,700 member companies from the United States and 53 other nations. Founded in 1917, its members include direct marketers from every business segment as well as the nonprofit and electronic marketing sectors. Included are catalogers, Internet retailers and service providers, financial services providers, book and magazine publishers, book and music clubs, retail stores, industrial manufacturers and a host of other vertical segments, including the service industries that support them. According to a DMA-commissioned economic-impact study, direct and interactive marketing sales in the United States are projected to have surpassed $1.7 trillion in 2003, including $133 billion in catalog sales and $41 billion in sales generated by the Internet. The DMA's Web site is www.the-dma.org, and its consumer Web site is www.shopthenet.org.

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