Consumer Protection, What Should You Expect From Your Lead Providers?

Posted on 30. Apr, 2009 by in Blog

Consumer protection is a hot button for the FTC and various other regulatory agencies. It is obviously important to consumers as they engage in commerce online, but what does it mean to your business?

If you are marketing online, consumer protection needs to be integrated into the fabric of each of your campaigns. Most understand this fact and are vigilant to comply with relevant regulations. However, most don’t use the same diligence in holding their lead providers to the same standards.

Careful, you can be held accountable for their practices.

Here are 6 important points of lead provider review the next time you evaluate a lead provider:

1. Do you use third party lead generation services or affiliates? If so, what is your compliance and due diligence process?

Most lead providers and brokers will purchase some quantity of traffic and leads from third-party sources. You are doing your job to perform consumer due diligence against your vendor network–make sure your lead provider is doing the same against their vendors.

2. Can I review an example of your standard affiliate, buyer, and vendor agreements (as applicable)?

This is the quickest way for you or your legal team to evaluate your legal exposure to practices of your lead providers. It is also a great way for you and your lead generation partner to strengthen each other, in a collaborative way.

3. Do you have a compliance education program for your marketing department and/or third-party lead generation sources?

This is really a simple effort. Whether it is a blog or an email newsletter, sending regular and brief consumer protection best practices out to your network is a smart move. This improves relationships and partnerships with regular communication and strengthens the network’s overall compliance fabric.

4. Do you have a quality control process that evaluates the validity and integrity of leads generated and marketing sources?

This is a non-brainer step in the right direction. Many lead providers have a proprietary process for scrubbing and quality controlling leads coming into their system. However, if they don’t have the technical capability or expertise there are great services available, like TargusInfo.

5. Can I review the landing pages, ad creative, telemarketing scripts, or privacy policy used to generate leads?

Obviously this is a sensitive request considering this is generally the competitive differentiator of most lead providers or marketing agencies. However, since you are outsourcing your marketing responsibilities to these lead providers you have some rights of review. You will most likely be carrying some liability for their lead generation practices. So, unless they are going to give you a contractual indemnification clause against these risks–do some level of review on these items.

6. What is your policy for dealing with relationships and marketing sources that are found to be out of compliance with relevant consumer protection laws?

Of course, all of this is idle chatter unless their is enforcement. It is absolutely a fair question to ask your lead provider what they do in the case of consumer protection compliance failure.

Get Educated on Consumer Protection

If you are not already education yourself on consumer protection laws and regulations, it is time to dig into the facts. Learn not only what the laws are, but what consumers are being told to expect from their online transactions. Here are some valuable consumer resource that I recommend you review:

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