Marketing Mess: 16 out of 21 business owners are guilty

It's no secret that I like to send cards to clients and colleagues on their birthdays -- I'm known at our local Hallmark store as "the card lady" since I buy birthday cards there in quantity.

In preparing to send some cards out, a member of my Team was getting me addresses for the ones I don't already have and noted something rather disturbing:

16 out of the 21 business sites she checked had NO address contact information.  That's 76% of the business owners she checked.

Why does this count as a "marketing mess" you ask?

Quite simply:

1. How can prospects and clients feel any sense of knowing you, let alone trusting you, if you have no contact information on your business site?

2. It's a violation of the CAN-SPAM law.  The law states that you must have at least a mailing address and phone number on your site.  And yes...this includes every sales page or single opt-in page you have as well as your primary website.

If you're a website designer/programmer, I hope you make it part of your package to share this information with your clients.

And if you are creating on your own, please note the above and update your sites if needed.

And...if you've created your own and have this information, KUDOS to you!

(On the positive side, the remaining 5 were my clients and they all had the information!)  :-)

Comments

[Lisa Almeida]

You know I'm all about compliance, Sandy. So imagine my surprise to learn that a physical address is also required on a website! That's news to me and I can't seem to locate it within the act. Can you help me you with that? Thanks :)

[Yvonne A Jones]

I found it interesting that you wrote about this at this time, Sandy, because I'm working on an e-commerce site and just read that my address needs to be on my site. I wondered if that rule also applied to Blogs and you just answered that. Thank you :)

[Diana]

I'm sorry but as an etsy artisan and a sort of cynical New Yorker, I'm not giving away my personal address to someone I don't know.

[Sandra Martini]

Hi Lisa,

Great news in that the law was updated last summer to change the definition of "physical" -- you can check it out on today's post at http://tinyurl.com/mkbxoc

Comply away :-)

With love and abundance,

Sandy :-)

[Sandra Martini]

Hi Diana,

No apology needed!

As a former New Yorker, raised in Massachusetts and worked with the DC feds, I'm not giving up my home address online either. :-)

It's a privacy concern that we all need to be aware of.

Good news is that the law was updated last year and doesn't expect us to share the info -- you can check out the updates on today's post at http://tinyurl.com/mkbxoc

With love and abundance,

Sandy :-)

[Nancy Marmolejo]

Sandy, I always make it a point to have my contact address and FYI Diana, it's not my home address!

You really do have to remind web people about that because if you don't specifically state it, they might forget.

Thanks for the great reminder... Card Lady... :-)

[Heather Floyd - Web Developer for Sole-proprietors]

Hi Sandy,

Thanks for letting us know about this update. A quick question:

RE: "The law states that you must have at least a mailing address and phone number on your site. And yes...this includes every sales page or single opt-in page you have as well as your primary website."

Do you actually need to have the address on every page, or just a link to a Contact page which lists a physical address?

I am a web developer and I'd like to make sure that the sites I am doing for my clients are compliant, without getting overly cluttered :-)

~Heather

[Sandra Martini]

Hi Heather,

I'm not an attorney and so can't provide legal advice, but what I do is list it on the bottom of every SINGLE page site and then have a CONTACT US page with the information for my regular website.

This ensures that the information is easy to find which I believe meets the requirement.

To be safe, you may wish to contact either an attorney trained in the CAN-SPAM law or the FTC directly.

Thanks for asking!

Sandy :-)