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Greetings,
One of the biggest concerns
people have before launching an e-newsletter is
being considered spammers. It's a valid concern,
but there's a huge difference between a legitimate
business sending an e-newsletter to its customer
base and some anonymous person blasting trash
to thousands of addresses purchased from a shady
list broker.
People subscribe to your e-newsletter
because they choose to receive it. And if you
follow the CAN-SPAM guidelines and use some courtesy
and common sense, no one will accuse you of being
a you-know-what!
Here's a tip: run your content
through the Lyris
Content Checker to make sure you're not using
too many words that trigger email filters.
-Andrea Harris-
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Related Issues
Boost
Your Search Engine Rankings with Email Newsletters
Enhance
Customer Relationships with Email Newsletters
Diversion:
Have
you noticed how bizarre spam subject lines have
become? What in the world are "Cloak a
flat" or "Suddenly crashed downstairs"
trying to sell?
SatireWire's
Poetry Spam offers up a good way to put
these subject lines to good use.
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The Bad Bobs: Canned by CAN-SPAM
Is the CAN-SPAM act really canning SPAM? It certainly
hasn’t stopped the flood of unsolicited email
in my mailbox. In fact, I think the SPAM has doubled
this year.
The CAN-SPAM act may not be working to stop the true
spammers, but it is tripping up some legitimate companies
that use email to keep in touch with customers. Bob
Vila, former host of This Old House, found this out
the hard way.
An Internet service provider in California is suing
the company that sends out Bob Vila’s Home Again
newsletter because it emailed recipients who had asked
to be removed from (opted out of) the mailing list.
The complaints also include sending 41 different email
messages bearing "materially false or misleading"
headers (subject lines) to trick people into reading
the correspondence.
Surely Bob Vila doesn’t fall into the same category
as the pill-pushers sending mail with loony subject
lines like “cold mackinaw altitude dagger.”
(Yes, I found that in my own inbox.) But his experience
shows that if your email marketing campaigns aren’t
compliant, you could end up in trouble.
Here’s a cheat sheet to help honest companies
keep out of trouble. It doesn’t attempt to explain
the entire act; to read the complete text of the law,
see www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html.
- Don’t harvest websites for email addresses.
- Include a clear unsubscribe option on every email,
and honor every request within 10 days. (Ideally,
you should honor requests immediately, because there’s
no better way to generate a complaint than to email
someone after they’ve asked to be removed.)
- Also honor unsubscribe requests you receive via
phone, fax, regular email, and postal mail.
- If someone unsubscribes from your list, make sure
they are removed from all of your other company mailing
lists, as well.
- Include your postal address in every issue.
- Don’t use misleading subject lines or sender
addresses.
The other “bad Bob” hasn’t gotten
into trouble — at least not yet. Bob Bly is a
highly successful author of copywriting books. A couple
of months ago I unsubscribed from his email newsletter
because I found it to be too heavy on promoting his
products and services, and too light on useful information.
Despite using an official-looking unsubscribe feature
at the bottom of his newsletter, I continued to receive
issues. I unsubscribed a couple more times, to no avail.
Finally, this week I found an email address on his website
and wrote a note asking to be removed from his list.
I didn’t receive a reply, so I’ll just have
to wait and see if that worked. I know Bob isn’t
a spammer; he just needs to fix his unsubscribe process.
But he could get into trouble just the same. Unlike
the offshore spammers, he’s honest about who he
is and where to find him.
It’s too bad that the new law can be used to
go after people like Bob Vila, who simply make mistakes,
but does nothing to stop the real bad guys, who are
flooding our email boxes every night.
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