Virtual Marketeers

Maintaining a good reputation is so important in business; cause and effect.

In reading this article please have a think about whether those people added to your email marketing list have requested and confirmed their continued inclusion in your email marketing list.

If they did not have the opportunity to opt in to receive your emails, then the emails sent may be considered to be, and treated as spam email by the authorities.  I am talking actual authorities and whole police units set up for handling spam, and from what I have heard spam is not handled lightly by these authorities.

So that you and your business is not subject to these types of problems, you might like to now look at whether you have received the appropriate permissions from your readers prior to adding them to your list.  The absolute best way is by using an automated double opt in process through a reputable email communications web program, such as AWeber, iContact etc.

These programs sometimes offer feedback, prior to you even sending the email, as to whether the email content that you are about to send might be considered by readers to contain spam content, allowing for you to further edit it if need be.

An email communication web program will also, very importantly encourage you to make use of additional subscriber options, such as unsubscribe, change email address etc.  Providing the option to your readers to unsubscribe is, as I understand it just as important as making sure that your readers have provided their expressed permission to be added to your email list in the first place.

Wouldn’t you rather set up the process, so that you are encouraging membership from people who have developed a genuine interest in your topic, your content, and maybe also respect for your person…?  I know that I would prefer to have readers to my blog and newsletter who are loyal and actually want to be there and reading my content.

It is most definitely unethical to sign people up without their personal expressed permission, and it could possibly serve to ruin a business if a person was to choose to build their list in this way.  Although some make a living out of spam, how many emails do you think they actually have to send out, and to what lengths do they need to go to actually make money out of this illegal act?

Now, looking to the person who has been subscribed to this list without being asked… would this person choose to stay subscribed, or would they feel that their comfort zone has been breached… their space invaded somewhat?  Would this feeling cause for this person to unsubscribe anyway or to ignore the content of the email?  If this was to be the case, then what are you actually achieving by adding them to the subscriber list without their permission?

Would it be more likely to foster a long-lasting positive or a negative perception on your business if you were to send emails out without the persons expressed permission?  If it was to foster a negative perception, then just as positive news spreads amongst our peers, would their not be a likelihood of this negative news to also spread amongst peers?

If you decide you would like to forward a copy of your business newsletter or copy for a client to have a read through, then go for it; but I would suggest that you put a note to the top of this newsletter or copy to let them know how to subscribe if they are interesting in continuing to receive your newsletter, rather than subscribing and sending the newsletter to them without any prior contact.

So to wrap up, make sure that you receive permission from those you are adding to your email list, be careful about the content in these email, and make sure that you provide the option somewhere in these emails for your members to also unsubscribe.