Do you want your meat canned or opt-in?

February 26th, 2008 · No Comments

I had a discussion with an entrepreneur about email blasts and I wanted to write an article about it. So I started at Wikipedia and wondered what they said about Spam?

Spam originally (also written as SPAM), a canned meat product sold by the Hormel Foods Corporation. Since then, many other uses of the term have emerged.
Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media.
E-mail spam, also known as “bulk e-mail” or “junk e-mail,” is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail.

The discussion I had started with; “is having a bizz card the same as opt-in permission” and “is having access to an email address because you received an email the same as opt-in permission”. In case you didn’t know, the answer on both questions is: No, this is not the same.
When you are sending an email blast to those two addresses, you are spamming.

This means: When you want to collect names and addresses for specific emails ask people to opt-in to receive these emails.
The discussion I had ended with: “How do you react on careless emails or even very professional emails you don’t expect. You know you have received these mails because you have opted-in”.

Of course legally the senders are not spamming, what means you can’t start a law-suit. Only you are not happy and normally you will act as if it were spam. This means you immediately throw the email away and the goodwill of the sender is thrown away.

Conclusion
You should be very careful when your sending an email blast to your customers even if they have opted in. Remember, it costs years to cultivate your goodwill. You can throw it away in just one click.

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