Data Security

Building a solid relationship with customers starts on a foundation of trust. From faith in your product to faith that you’ll deliver on time, the consumer has to have confidence that you’ll keep up your part of the bargain. With identity theft and e-commerce attacks on the rise, one of the biggest leaps of faith that a consumer takes is just handing over his or her personal information to you. The Direct Marketing Association offers the following tips to keep your customers’ information secure: 1. Have a security policy. Establish information security policies and practices to ensure the uninterrupted security of your information systems.

For catalogers, payment fraud accounts for a high cost of doing business. On the Internet alone, estimates are that losses from payment fraud exceeded $1.6 billion in 2003. For direct-response merchants, credit card fraud losses averaged 1 percent of orders in 2003, which may not sound exorbitant, but in terms of total sales, the costs are huge. The good news is that online fraud losses declined from 2.9 percent of total online revenues in 2002 to 1.7 percent in 2003, according to Cybersource Corp./Mindwave Research. The cost to your customers also is high, because for every fraudulent order, merchants reject another three or

A computer programmer visited Guess.com last year to look for jeans. Before entering his order, he keyed into the site’s address bar a string of characters, and up popped about 200,000 of Guess.com’s customer names and credit card numbers. His selection of characters wasn’t random. Rather, the code he keyed in is well-known among programmers, and plugging it in is called an SQL (Structured Query Language) injection attack. In June, Guess.com settled for an undisclosed sum with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on charges that it misled consumers by stating in its privacy policy that it protected consumer data when, in fact,

Consumers are nervous about how much of their information is readily available to anyone who knows how to access it. We’re not talking just about identity theft, which is a criminal offense, but about legal marketing practices. Indeed, consumers are being deluged with direct marketing offers pitched at them by mail, e-mail and telephone. Think about it from their viewpoint. While you think you’re helping consumers by making just-in-time offers to satisfy their needs and desires, they’re thinking: “Whoa! Can we get a little privacy over here?” Just how much do consumers care about this issue? A lot. For example, 69 percent

About 10 percent of all consumer catalogers and an estimated 25 percent of business-to-business catalogers don’t rent or exchange names with any outside companies, according to a leading list-management company. This month I’ll discuss the different aspects of putting your No. 1 company asset — your customer list — on the rental market. Caveat: I believe it’s healthy and necessary for a catalog company to rent and exchange names with others — providing the proper controls that govern the use or unauthorized use of the names are in place. Consumer catalogers that don’t rent their lists often rationalize this practice

CALIFORNIA LAW recently defined three types of acceptable e-mail use. Companies can send e-mail to: 1. Consumers provided that the marketer identifies the message as commercial e-mail by beginning the subject line with “ADV.” 2. Consumers who have given permission via an opt-in. 3. Consumers with whom they have a prior business relationship. While these rules aren’t overly restrictive, similar legislation is coming down the pike nationally, and companies that choose to prospect or communicate with existing customers should be prepared to comply, now. Which of these three methods should they use? It depends on the goal of the campaign, but mostly success relies

Instead of just repurposing copy and images, rethink your Web catalog for more effective merchandising Personalization and variable data printing are making their marks on the print catalog world, but the place where customized merchandising techniques are likely to shine is the Web. While a print catalog is static, a Web catalog is dynamic and can be generated in order to meet the needs of the customer at hand. Explains Vahe Katros, director of retail applications at Blue Martini, a San Mateo, CA-based company that creates Web merchandising software: There’s two issues to versioning catalogs: how many different merchandise assortments you can