Keeping B2B Clients out of "Email Spammer Prison"
April 30, 2008
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.
