To build your email list, as well as consumer trust, at the time you collect email addresses you should disclose how they will be used.

Such openness will help the consumer better understand how you will use his or her email address. Here are some tips on on how to disclose your email practices at the point where you collect email addresses:

• Describe the nature of the types of emails you send customers, covering both commercial/promotional emails and relationship/transactional messages.
• Explicitly state whether you will sell, rent, or otherwise share consumers’ email addresses with a third party, as well as what those parties will be using the addresses for. It is just as important to let consumers know what you don’t do as well as what you do.
• If the customer must agree to receive a commercial or promotional email message in order to receive a service you provide, disclose this requirement at the time of collection.
• You must locate your disclosure on your Web forms in close proximity to the fields where consumers enter their email addresses -- not just anywhere on the Web page.
• Consumers should not be made to scroll down to the bottom of a Web page to learn what will happen to their email address.

The more you help consumers understand how you are going to use their email addresses, the more confident they can feel in giving their address to you.

Eileen Rico is an account manager at TRUSTe.

Read past tips at www.truste.org/sealholders/tech_tips.php.

 

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