Keeping B2B Clients out of "Email Spammer Prison"
Here is an apology from the famous Seth Godin for sending an email to people without permission. If it’s good enough for him it’s good for us. Opt-in and full permission is becoming key in the world of B2B Internet Marketing. It’s not enough any more to just “get an email address” and send people anything we want, especially with penalties regarding CAN-SPAM compliance and the risk of being blacklisted by major ISPs as a “spammer” even when your intentions were pure.
If either of our companies are going to be truly effective, we have to be ruthless that people are getting only what they give us full permission to send them. We intend to clean up our act among all our clients and apply these practices to all future projects.
- There is a strong business case that we are just making people angry when we send them something they didn’t ask for.
- When our own website visitors opted-in to our email autoresponder, we have seen nearly a 100% conversion to personally contacting us.
We will be putting attention on getting new leads to double-opt-in with
- an irresistible offer
- and compelling message.
If they don’t double-opt-in, too bad for them but we won’t be sending them info to jam up their inbox with what could be easily called spam.
Fortunately in the B2B community, it is accepted practice to request phone numbers on lead forms so we can follow up with a phone call but that’s the end if there is no double-opt-in. They would then be scrubbed from our lists.
Great post. I had a recent experience with an online headhunter agency who spammed me to death. In this case however, the company (www.neohire.com) was a sham run by a guy who was a known fraud. I turned it over to the LAPD (in addition to reporting them to the ISPs, FTC and Spamcops). It’s mindboggling that in this day and age B2B marketers would send commercial emails that don’t have an Opt-out, no address or one that I never signed up for to begin with.
Very sound advice, Do you have any experience with the Veretekk e-mail system, they claim to be 100% SPAM free and 100% verifiable optin,
Haven’t used that system personally.
100% verifiable optin is pretty much an industry standard with your higher-profile mail programs. By “high profile” I don’t mean “high cost”, either. Aweber does the same and has much more powerful tools.
“Spam free” is unfortunately in the eye of the subscriber and a relative term. I checked out what their product does. Suppose a recipient is tired of getting that newsletter and is too lazy to go to the bottom and click “unsubscribe”. They click “spam” instead - then you get a spam report. It takes a few to make a difference with your overall deliverability but 100% isn’t true even though I understand what they’re talking about