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August 12, 2004 "Spam is Still in the Eye of the Beholder" I've been reminded of this twice recently -- once last month when a colleague came to me looking for advice. She runs professional events for small business owners. She's built an e-mail list from business cards she's collected at various networking events and sends to it periodically. She doesn't consider her e-mails, promoting professional events, to be spam. But apparently some of her recipients do -- her ISP has received complaints about the e-mails. She wanted my advice. She's concerned about continuing to send to the list for fear of more complaints and being shut off by her ISP. But shifting to USPS mail would be costly and require more lead time. The underlying issue here: Letting people self-select what e-mail they want to receive from you is a best practice. Ignore it at your own risk. It's not just small business marketers who are making this error in judgment. I recently signed-up to receive e-mail from ESPN. I'm a sports fan, primarily football and hockey, so I wanted to get news on the upcoming seasons. Two things of note on their registration:
One of the items was:
I like Mickey Mouse as well as the next person, so I left this box checked, thinking I'd get offers for Disney World, Etc. What I got was something completely different. Weekly e-mail updates on ABC Soap Operas and Prime Time Programming. Neither of which I watch. I know because they came to an e-mail address that I had only used to sign-up at the ESPN website. Even the footer was misleading; it read:
When you
registered with our site, you asked to receive The ABC Soaps Hotsheet. Not only had I never been to the site, I did not ask to receive the Soaps Hotsheet. I wonder if they signed up all the men who registered on ESPN to get this as well (I bet not!). It's a bit sexist, and a bit insulting. And this is similar in the error in judgment that my colleague made:
Even in this era of CAN-SPAM, the power still lies with the recipient. It may not be illegal to send e-mail that's not requested, but it's not good business. You want to build a quality list of people who are anxious to open, read and click-on your e-mails; having a large quantity of names who don't want to receive your information isn't going to help you achieve your business objectives in the long run.
I help my clients build opt-in lists of people who want to
receive their information -- people who respond by opening, clicking and buying.
Best,
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