How to Market Using Email

Contents

Q: What is Spam?

A: The definition of Spam is open to considerable debate. In general, Spam is considered to be any E-mail that solicits or advertises anything (business, support for political or religious beliefs, web site links), sent to one or more people who did not specifically ask to receive that sort of E-mail from the sender.

Spam generally has other characteristics, including forged headers, fraudulent product offerings, poor grammer and spelling, etc. However, even the most honest, well-crafted message is Spam if it meets the above definition.

Q: Why is Spam bad?

A: The short answer is that the Internet community has decided that Spam is bad. If you send Spam you will denied access to much of the Internet and your upstream provider will be placed under pressure to disconnect you from the Internet. In most cases your upstream provider will give you one or two warnings and then disconnect you for violating their Acceptable Use Policy.

There are several reasons the community has decided that Spam is bad. The primary reason is that people generally oppose direct marketing of any form. On the Internet they simply have more effective ways to voice their displeasure than they do for postal direct marketing or telemarketing.

Spam costs the sender virtually nothing to send. However, it costs the recipient in computing resources to receive and store the messages, and costs time to filter or delete incoming Spam. This cost-shifting encourages spammers to send mail to as many people as possible and makes E-mail Spam different in many ways from postal direct marketing or even telemarketing.

Spam degrades the utility of E-mail. E-mail is the most widely used and most important application on the Internet. Currently, because Spam is considered a tool of sleazy businesses and is against the AUP of all respectable ISPs, very few people send Spam. These very few people already manage to account for a substantial portion of many people's E-mail. If Spam were ever allowed to proliferate, E-mail would become essentially useless as the volume of Spam far outweighed the volume of useful mail in people's mailboxes.

To envision the potential problem, realize that there are in excess of 10 million businesses in the US alone. If each of those businesses sent you only one piece of Spam per year, you would receive 27,000 pieces of Spam per day in your mailbox. Would you even bother using E-mail?

Q: How do I market via E-mail without becoming a spammer?

A: E-mail can be a very effective (and relatively inexpensive) means for staying in touch with your customers or potential customers. The trick is to ensure the communication is solicited. The recipient must come to you and ask for information before you start sending them E-mail. Your first E-mail to them must come as a response to a solicitation from them.

That solicitation may come in many forms. Someone may E-mail you or contact you via telephone. They might hand you their business card at a tradeshow and ask for follow-up information. They might post to an online forum and ask for potential vendors or solution providers to contact them regarding a specific problem. Note that an online post is not an invitation to be sent unrelated advertisements, nor is posting an E-mail address on a web page. Finally, anyone who is already a customer of yours and has given you an E-mail address for sales-related purposes can generally be sent information on new products or services without it being considered Spam.

By far the best way to build a contact list is to operate a confirmed opt-in mailing list. Using widely available tools, you can setup mailing lists so that people can subscribe themselves to a mailing list you operate. To prevent unscrupulous people from subscribing addresses that do not belong to them, it is important to use a confirmed opt-in list. This means that the list software sends a unique token to the new subscriber which must be responded to (by E-mail or by clicking on a web link) before they are truly considered to be on the list. Spammers call this double opt-in, to try to make it sound onerous, when in fact it is not.

You must respect opt-out requests. If someone asks you to stop sending them E-mail, stop. Any future E-mail to someone who has asked you to stop will be Spam. Mailing list software can help in this, too, as it generally allows people to remove themselves from your list without your intervention.

Finally, even if you are very careful, someone on your list will eventually complain about you sending them E-mail, generally because they forgot they solicited your communication. It is important to document when and how each person who receives your E-mail solicited that communication. Again, the best mechanism is the confirmed opt-in mailing list. You should log the original subscription message and the return of of the opt-in token. In the case of web-based subscription, you should log the date, time and IP address of the subscription attempt and the confirmation page and store that information with the E-mail address for future reference.

Q: Can I just buy a list of opt-in E-mail addresses??

A: No. There is no such thing. If someone has not specifically asked to be on your list, they have not opted in. There are many people selling so-called opt-in lists. They are frauds. A true opt-in list operator manages a list and may send E-mail on your behalf. They cannot sell you the list.

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