How does general policy change in the face of a known health emergency? It’s a tricky question that can be fraught with pitfalls and emotions. So, this will be the very first of an intermittent series of posts covering the policy implications of things happening in real life.
First, a disclaimer
I feel the need to be super-specific here: I’m not pronouncing policy for systems that I am in charge of watching over. The purpose of this post is merely to give a series of considerations that lead me in a particular direction and belief that the world should work a certain way. So, as with the rest of this blog, these are merely my opinions, and you should not use this post to decide whether my current employer will treat any particular message in any particular manner.
Not much changes
It’s probably somewhat glib to start this way, but our baseline here is that nothing essential changes for “emergencies.” Gmail isn’t suddenly turning off machine learning for its spam filtering solution. It isn’t rolling back its algorithms to create exemptions for emails mentioning “COVID-19” or “coronavirus.” Opt-in is still opt-in, opt-out is still opt-out, and the general rules that people have to abide by all still apply.
If it were any other way, then there would be a lot more truth to this Twitter post by an intermittently posting, humorous marketing account:
But things do change
On the other hand, just about everyone involved understands that material allowances need to be made in times of public crisis. The question becomes what change is allowable and how long it will last.
Mailbox providers understand that they play a vital role in helping to get vital information to their subscribers. They understand that being perceived as “getting in the way” of the flow of that information could well be detrimental to their interests.
And, the more things change…
From the mailbox provider’s standpoint, however, there are two ways that they could “get in the way” of the flow of critical information:
- Block information from coming in.
- Open the gates so far that information is buried.
The problem with an issue like the current COVID-19 pandemic is that everyone wants to “reassure their customers.” That can lead to non-essential information overload:
There are hundreds of more examples that I could include just on Twitter alone. However, these should suffice to show that email recipients are already starting to suffer from an overload of non-essential COVID-19-related information.
Policy in the Time of Corona
This means that rational policy decisions need to be made based on the actual importance of the message presented as perceived by the recipient. This is important to the mailbox providers as they play their role of gatekeeper, it is important to the brands sending the messages (as they would likely want to prevent the types of consumer reaction that we see in the Tweets above), and, finally, it has to be important to the email service provider who sits between those entities.
The most often asked question will be, “Can I send this message as a transactional or relationship message?” And the answer will be that “it depends.” The CAN-SPAM Act defines “Transactional or relationship messages” in 15 USC 7702(17)(A).1 My team generally uses it to inform our policy about what can be considered a transactional or relationship message.
So, what would count? Announcements about:
- Shipping delays (i, via “facilitation”)
- Reports of
- office closures,
- quarantines,
- limitations of hours and/or services, or
- potential exposure to infected persons reports (ii)
- Changes or cancellations to trip itineraries (v)
And even these announcements need to have a level of sanity applied to them. If someone has not purchased anything, sending a notification that their non-existent shipment might be delayed should be out of bounds — the proper time to make that announcement is at the point of sale or if an unexpected delay occurs post-sale. While it makes a lot of sense to tell cruise line customers that operations have been suspended for 30 days, it does not make much sense to tell people who haven’t been on that line’s cruises in the last two years.
What probably doesn’t count here at all are the endless notifications that companies “are very concerned about you and our employees” and are now making their employees wash their hands and wipe things down with disinfectant. But both are things that we hope were happening before this outbreak.
There can certainly be exceptions made to policies. Even those typically applied quite stringently. But those need to be extraordinarily exceptional in both cause and content. For instance, a local company may decide to send out a message to its list of contacts to help spread the word about a local disaster declaration and its ramifications for the customer — even if the company itself would suffer no harm and there would ordinarily be no logical reason to link the company to the content. The assistance to the greater public good can win the day (especially with excellent targeting and on-point messaging).
And so endth the lesson…
If you would like more information about the dos and don’ts of sending virtue-signaling messages during a time of crisis, let me point you to an excellent post by Augie Ray at Gartner.2 It’s an excellent primer on what to do (and what not to do) from a brand marketer’s perspective.
Footnotes
- 15 U.S. Code § 7702 – Definitions, LII / Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7702 (last visited Mar 16, 2020). ↩︎
- Augie Ray, Beware of Virtue Signaling or Outright Greed in Brand Communications About COVID-19, Gartner for Marketers (2020), https://web.archive.org/web/20200422061123/https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/03/15/beware-virtue-signaling-outright-greed-brand-communications-covid-19/ (last visited Mar 16, 2020). ↩︎
