Email Marketing Pt 2

The Difference between Permission Based Email Marketing and Spam

 Email marketing is about keeping in contact and enhancing your relationship with your existing customers or potential customers that you have already had some form of contact with. 

Spam is email sent using lists purchased from a 3rd party that may have acquired those names without the consent of the owners of those email addresses.

The Risks and Dangers of Spam 

 Purchased lists are most often old, over-used and not properly targeted to your specific offerings.  If you do not have the consent of the owner of the email address to be sent the email, and you have never had any type of previous contact with the recipient, then you are most likely sending spam.

 Avoid the purchase of any lists unless you are 100% sure that the recipients have granted the list seller permission to provide you with their emails, you are confident about the reputation of the seller of the list, and you are confident of the freshness (how current the addresses are) of the list.

 Sending Spam can be illegal, can result in all future individual messages from your email address being blocked by the recipient, or even their whole company or organization. It can even result in all your future emails being blocked by the recipient’s Internet Service provider such as Verizon or Time Warner. Email providers like Google, MSN, Yahoo or AOL also may block all your emails to anyone using their email services. Sending Spam can even result in the suspension of your Web Site Hosting Agreement with your web hosting provider.

 Even if you don’t actually send Spam, sometimes your messages can get misinterpreted by the recipients as Spam, or accidently marked as such by them. This too can result in your future messages being blocked. Once you are blocked it is extremely difficult, expensive and time consuming to remove it, especially when dealing with very large Internet Service Providers or Email Providers.

 That is one of the important reasons that you should always use an Email Marketing Provider, rather than your own domain name or email address to send bulk marketing emails. This protects your domain and email addresses from being accidently blocked. The email provider has a multitude of addresses and domains to use if one becomes blocked, and already has developed contacts, relationships and a positive reputation within large ISPs and Email providers to deal with any mistakes or problems.

What is CAN_SPAM Compliance?