ALISO VIEJO, Calif. -- The scenario is becoming more and more familiar for millions of unwitting consumers across the U.S. -- a daily inundation of unsolicited emails offering low interest rate mortgages and other spam-oriented home loan and refinance offers.
In particular, the issue of spam -- or unsolicited Internet junk mail -- has become a hot topic in the online mortgage industry in recent months. Part of the industry's anti-spam focus is due in large part to the proliferation of mortgage-oriented spam emails on the Net, even with the year-old Federal CAN-SPAM law in effect -- a law designed to curb unwanted, unsolicited electronic mail from clogging email in-boxes.
While a majority of Internet mortgage professionals take this issue very seriously, one company in particular is going to great lengths to put the kibosh on the distribution of unsolicited and unscrupulous email marketing.
GoApply.com, a leading mortgage and financial services website, says it adopts extremely stringent anti-spam policies and procedures as part of its company-wide charter. In addition, the company mandates its business partners to heed stringent anti-spam policies as well or face violating their GoApply.com contractual agreements. According to the company, this is an excellent first step to stopping spam in its tracks.
"We take anti-spam compliance very seriously and we expect our business partners to do the same," said Bill Baskin, COO of GoApply.com. "It's important for organizations in this industry to do their homework, to have comprehensive processes in place to analyze who they're doing business with and how they're getting customers, and most importantly, it's essential for credible organizations like ours to keep each other in check -- it's important for the protection of consumers as well as the integrity of the online mortgage industry."
Baskin goes on to say that many consumers are confused and don't realize that commercial email marketing is actually quite legal under state and federal law as long as the email itself contains the necessary information and disclosures required by law. Federal law outlined these technical requirements when the government passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Baskin says that GoApply.com helps its marketing partners by providing CAN-SPAM compliance analysis for their advertising campaigns while educating them about the intricacies of the overall CAN-SPAM law.
By definition, GoApply.com is an online lead generator -- an organization that matches home loan and refinance customers with accredited lenders across the country. In some cases, GoApply.com -- and other large online lead generators in the industry -- rely on outside marketing companies to secure home loan customer requests. On the back end, this process of 'affiliate marketing' is complex because a variety of different websites and marketers work in conjunction with one another (or aside from one another) to generate requests. Since there are different points of contact and different people involved in the marketing process, sometimes it's difficult for companies to monitor how mortgage customers are originated in the first place. In certain situations, even well intentioned organizations like GoApply.com aren't aware any spamming has taken place until after (and in some cases IF) the customer indicates to the lender that he or she was spammed in the first place
According to Baskin and other industry experts, the integrity of this industry could indeed be at stake if spamming continues. For instance, Jupiter Research, a leading industry analysis and market research company, recently backed off its growth projections for online mortgages -- projections it published in 2003 -- due in part to the fact that consumers feel 'put off' by spam emails that tout 'too good to be true' online mortgage options. What's more, according to recent news reports, this type of spam is reportedly the second biggest category of unsolicited junk email, which can ultimately inhibit this industry's overall growth potential.
So exactly what is GoApply.com doing to curb spammers? Baskin says the company employs some of the toughest policies in the industry, including stringent opt-out services for consumers, real-time database management to ensure an opt-out consumer's information is immediately processed and removed from the company's distribution list, strict compliance with DO-NOT-CALL and CAN-SPAM regulations, extensive lead scrubbing (including phone prefix, city, state and zip code identifiers), quality control phone verification and strict quality control measures to guarantee the company's business partners are complying with GoApply.com's staunch anti-spam guidelines. If a GoApply.com business partner violates this compliance, the partnership is immediately terminated due to contractual violations. This company-wide commitment to compliance is evidenced by the organization's average spam complaint ratio of 1/10th of one percent of all leads processed every month.
Even with strict quality control measures in place, Baskin says sometimes a spam-generated home loan request falls through the cracks and is routed to one of the company's participating lenders, but instances like this -- as unfortunate as they are -- are an infrequent occurrence. Regardless, Baskin says GoApply.com is committed to "stamping out spam" at every turn and will make sure its business partners are committed to doing the same.
