Avoid The Pitfalls of E-mail Marketing

Yesterday, I returned from a much deserved (yet short) vacation. I fired up the techno-box and down loaded about 400 messages. A few orders, several new prospects, lots of Spam, and a WARNING from my local ISP.

Apparently, someone had signed up to receive my newsletter using an e-mail address that is now being filtered by a anti-spam script. Since the complaint that my ISP received was automatically generated by "Spam-Kill", the originators e-mail address was concealed.

I had no way to contact this person and I did not have an e-mail address to remove from my list. If I continued to publish my newsletter, my ISP would surely close my account. Fortunately, I had taken precautions.

Read the following information carefully. It will save you time, money, and lots of frustration.

First, call your ISP and let them know you publish a newsletter or manage an opt-in e-mail list. Tell them that you keep copies of all subscription requests and ask them to please forward any complaints to you.

Second, keep copies of every subscription request including their IP address. If Someone complains to your ISP, you can look up the name in your mail program and forward the proof to your ISP. If you use a Perl script, its easy to send a copy to your mail program and one to you for your records. You can also tell the script to save the information to a text file for easy storage.

Third, keep logs of all your mailings. Most mailing software gives you the option to create log files that contain the message ID of each recipient. In the case of anti-spam script that I mentioned above, I simply looked up the message ID and matched it with the spam report generated by "Spam-Kill."

These are important precautions to take any time you engage any type of e-mail marketing. But dont forget the basic rules that help avoid complaints in the first place.

Get permission to send mail to your prospects and never trick anyone into subscribing.

Give your recipients a simple method to unsubscribe from your list. Dont require exact syntax. You can set up filtering rules that will look for certain words like remove, unsubscribe, take me off your list you bleebing bleep! etc...

E-mail marketing can be a literal gold mine. But it can also be a pain in the butt. Take the precautions illustrated herein and your success is guaranteed.

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