Birthday Emails could land you in court

Everyone likes Birthday emails. You collect each customers’ date of birth, then send marketing emails to them or their friends just before each birthday, to wish them a happy birthday and make more sales.

So what’s the problem? A little thing called COPPA:

the COPPA Rule came into effect in 1998 when [the US] Congress first passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The Rule requires that operators of websites or online services directed to or knowingly used by children under the age of 13 years follow a number of special steps aimed at protecting children’s privacy, specifically around how children’s “personal information” (name, address, email, etc.) is handled … Some scholars argue, for instance, that the Rule has had a number of unintended consequences, including closing off vast swaths of the Internet from younger children, as banning users under the age of 13 can be perceived as easier and more cost effective than attempting to tackle COPPA compliance

Revisiting the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by Sara M. Grimes, PhD - The Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Do you really want to get involved in more compliance work than you need? Then make sure you never collect anyone’s date of birth, even if that means you don’t send birthday emails.

ROI of Birthday Marketing Campaigns

Before you embark on a birthday email marketing campaign, think about the ROI and in particular the design work.

You’re only going to be able to use it 1x per person per year.

This compares very badly with a typical weekly newsletter-style campaign that you can use 52x per person per year, with minimal changes - a *lot* more marketing for a very similar investment

Valuing Startups

This is just a “bit of fun”, but I’ve been wondering about how you value small, rapidly-growing, hitech startups.

Any valuation would have to depend on the startup surviving, because technology has no value without the people to implement it. And, while larger companies are valued at 2x income, accounting for this too strictly seems unfair for a company with few customers, at the very start of its growth phase.

But I think I have a method. Here’s an example:

1. A new startup is getting regular orders, on average one per working day, each of which will earn £100 per month in license income.
2. I know, from my previous companies, that the customers will stay for 3 years on average
3. So each day’s new orders are really worth £3,600.
4. Each year’s new orders are really worth £900,000 (assuming 250 working days per year)
5. This value is basically income, albeit deferred a bit
6. So the company is worth 2x income, i.e. £1,800,000.

This assumes nothing goes wrong with the company, orders continue, prices hold up, and customers stay for 3 years on average - which may be optimistic. Also that growth is linear with no re-investing in sales - which is pessimistic.

What do you think?

Marketers: Beware Data Dredging

Facebook users are unwittingly revealing intimate secrets – including their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs – using only public “like” updates, according to a study of online privacy.

The research into 58,000 Facebook users in the US found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain. - The Guardian

This has got a lot of press, but it looks like a classical case of “data dredging” (Wikipedia), where researchers try very large numbers of hypotheses against the same data. Inevitably, some of their hypotheses will appear to be “true”, just at random. They then publish only these “true” results.

Sound familiar? It should, because this is a lot like the way that some marketers use analytics tools.

Data Dredging is a fine way to find possible correlations, but they need checking in a completely independent experiment, before anyone claims they have found a real result.