Is Spam Affecting Your Business Email?
5 Ways Spam Is Affecting Your Business And what we can all
do to prevent it.
If you had only just got online, and received your first
few emails, you may be forgiven for thinking you had hit
paydirt.
You would already have heard how you won millions on a
foreign lottery, then some benevolent foreigner wants to
give you more millions because a relative has died and he
needs help to get his inheritance, and you’re someone he
can trust. And as luck would have it, those personal body
parts you don’t discuss with anyone are actually too small,
but a few people can help you with that for a very low fee.
And you have all that Cas.h coming so…..
But you’re a seasoned veteran, and none of that is worth
your time, it’s just so much spam.
You probably don’t even see any of it.
Don’t give it a second thought.
Maybe you need to.
It is because it is so easy and cheap to send email that
you as a marketer want to use it,and spammers selling dodgy
pills want to exploit it. They send out a million untargeted
messages in a few hours, and rely on the fact that even if
only 1 or 2 % of the people they sent it to bu.y their wares
they will be in Profi.t.
You try to send a more targeted mailing, but due to the
spammers all email is being vetted more carefully, and spam
is hurting all of our businesses, even responsible marketers
like you who wouldn’t even think about using it.
Here are the 5 reasons you should consider the
implications of spam more carefully.
1 The time it takes to sort your emails is increased, but
you can always use filters or antispam software. Which
brings us to
2 False positives in antispam software means, if you don’t
check the filtered out spam, you may miss a valuable
contact from a customer. So you have to check it all
anyway.
3 Your customers use spam blockers, or their isps do so you
need to rethink your newsletter or email to your list of
prospects so you don’t trigger theirs.
4 Due to the amount of people you can reach with email, you
are more likely to encounter someone who reports you for
spam even after they signed up and double opted into your
newsletter. Result:- your domain gets blacklisted, and you
spend time undoing the damage.
5 People are more wary about giving their e-mail addresses
out so it’s harder work getting them to sign up for your
newsletter in the first place. You need an easy to find
privacy promise on your site.
Because so many people have used spam to sell their
products, we all suffer.
Even with all these spam related problems, email remains a
viable and usable option for Online marketin.g, but it needs
a bit more care than it did before.
Governments may be stepping in and passing laws to outlaw
spam, but the spammers themselves will move their servers
to a safe place with a more tolerant government. We need to
do our bit to keep email as an advertising option and play
safe.
Consider putting your newsletters online and sending a
short email with the link to the latest issue in it.
Never bu.y from a spammers email, and despite some advice
you may have seen to the contrary it is unwise to try to
reply to unsubscribe, that just proves they have an email
address which is live.
Be careful where you get leads from if you bu.y them, some
unscrupulous companies will sell you email lists harvested
straight from website mailto links.
CD’s full of 1000’s of names are not a good buy to market
to, they will have been sold and sold again, and the people
whose email addresses are on them will have been sent too
many offers already.
Always email responsibly, and ensure you give people a
plain privacy link, and an even more plain unsubscrib.e link
in every email.
Douglas Titchmarsh runs several websites, and blogs including
http://www.cashinonline.info and
http://www.titchmarsh.com
