03/18/2008 Post By: Andrew Kamphuis
Jason’s been doing a lot of homework the last couple days here in the dealing with mass email going to large ISPs such as Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and others. You can encourage him to blog some of his research, but it is becoming harder and harder for mail to be delivered to large ISPs.
Is your emailing list spam? I take a pretty hard view and say if it’s not permission based it’s spam. Sending mass email to people who bought your product is considered spam. Sending mass email to prospects who requested a brochure is spam. Sending email to people who stopped by your tradeshow booth is spam.
Just because a person has bought your product, or requested a brochure, doesn’t mean they signed up for your mass email. In order for it not to be spam, it has to be permission based. You have to explicitly ask. It should be double opt-in.
If you follow the CAN-SPAM laws, you need your address on the email, you won’t hide who the email is coming from, you will provide an easy way for people to get off the list.
Your permission email list takes time to build, and at the same time it’s very rewarding, and is one of your most valuable assets. However if you dilute your list with trade show prospects, and other random people, you devalue your asset to the point where it’s worthless.
Consider a list of 1000 permission email list that you know gets delivered and gets results everytime for you. You want to grow your list faster, so now you add 7000 'prospective' people you gained from a tradeshow. So you email 8000 people. If enough of those 7000 people mark your email as spam, your entire mailing will be blocked by the major ISPs. Not only are the 7000 additional people worthless, the 1000 people you used to send to are also useless.
You can call and talk to us all you want (and we’ve had a few of these calls lately), but if your list is anything but a permission list, it’s spam.
What do you think? (And if you have questions you want to ask privately, feel free to email me).
Jason Andres - 03/19/2008
http://www.k1technology.com
I recently purchased a bottle of wine online and the expeirence was great, I received my purchase confirmation via email and the bottle arrived on time.
One week later I received another email that was a newsletter, highlighting the wine of the month and up coming events which I didn't ask for but took a brief look then deleted; then another in email came two weeks later with promotions, this message I just ignored and since I have received 2 messages per month.
If this happened for everything I purchased online or in a store, I estimate I would receive hundreds if not thousands of messages per month just in newsletters and promotions.
Good thing my Gmail account has a button that is in plain view to easily delete the message and prevent me from getting any more!!! [Report Spam]
I would be nice and click unsubscribe on the email, if I could find the link and didn't have to fill out a form to get off the list.
