Legislating against Unsolicited Electronic Messages Sent for Marketing or Promotional Purposes (Spam): Regulatory Impact and Business Compliance Cost Statement
25. For businesses involved in direct marketing or the sending of promotional messages by electronic means there will be an initial cost while they move to best e-marketing practice if they have not already done so. This will involve:
- Ensuring their address lists are opt-in based or that an appropriate business or other relationship exists. The actual cost of this is unlikely to be significant as only a small number are likely to be impacted and the costs for those who are impacted are likely to be in the nature of a day or two of a staff member's time. In addition, where email addresses are for natural persons the Privacy Act already requires that they only be held for the purpose for which they were given.
- Ensuring that electronic marketing or promotional messages contain accurate sender identification and include a functional unsubscribe facility (a working, clearly visible means of opting out of future mailings). This mechanism may simply involve instructing the recipient to return the email with "unsubscribe" in the subject field or providing a link to perform this task automatically if the recipient wishes to unsubscribe. To comply with this requirement an email template change at trivial cost is all that would be required.
- Setting up a system for ensuring that lists of email addresses for marketing or promotional purposes are up to date and comply with the legislative consent requirements.
- Learning the new requirements
26. Ongoing compliance costs would be the administration costs involved in maintaining an up to date email address list for marketing or promotional purposes. This would simply mean acting in accordance with best e-marketing practice and may already be part of most businesses administrative practices.
27. The parties likely to be affected by the legislation are businesses that send electronic marketing or promotional messages. It is unclear how many parties are likely to be affected as no data is kept on this. It would certainly cover all businesses involved in direct marketing online such as banks, insurance companies and retailers who keep customer email lists.
28. The estimated compliance costs will vary for each business will range from zero for those who already comply with best practice to potentially one-off costs of $1,000 - $2,000 for larger businesses that need to make changes to their systems to ensure ongoing compliance. The ongoing administration costs are likely to be minor and part of the wider marketing function already provided for.
29. Steps taken to minimise compliance costs will include educating business on best practices of e-mail marketing and on cost effective means of carrying out best practices and complying with legislation. A four-month transitional period will be provided to allow time to adjust to the new requirements. The definition of "spam" has also been limited to marketing and promotional electronic messages which is narrower than in Australia where all commercial messages relating to an offer of goods are services (e.g. quotes and invoices) are caught by its anti-spam legislation.
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