| Tobias DiPasquale on 9 Dec 2004 01:51:02 -0000 |
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Dec 8, 2004, at 8:03 PM, Marc Zucchelli wrote: Then what is the difference between spam and legit email marketing? I would like as much info on this as possible in case I am being naive. I also dont want to get anyone in trouble. Legitimate email marketing, bulk or otherwise, implies active consent on the part of the recipient vis a vis the choice to receive your marketing materials. This usually happens during the signing up for an account of some kind or the use of a company's services (e.g. the email field on your bank account application). Sometimes customers sign up for mailing lists from a company, etc. Spam, on the other hand, is also known as UBE (unsolicited bulk email) or UCE (unsolicited commercial email), which are more precise terms that are also better monikers for the syndrome. When you send large amounts of email to mailboxes that you don't have a relationship with, then you're spamming. Buying lists from third-party "vendors" (usually spammers themselves) is classic spamsign. The difference between a spammer and a legitimate bulk emailer is sometimes very thin. Bulk email tends to look a lot like spam to traditional heuristic filters and often gets misclassified as such. But the key to not being a spammer is consent: if your targets truly want to receive your email, then you're not spamming them (even if some of them forget that they gave you that consent at a later date). Every Internet company of a certain size has a mailing list, and some of those addresses will be invalid for one or more of a number of reasons. Sometimes the person drops an address and another picks it up (e.g. jenny@yahoo.com), sometimes a customer submitted a false address from the get-go that just so happened to be another person's address, etc, etc. But legitimate bulk emailers quickly pick this up and get rid of these addresses because they understand that sending more email to these addresses will not garner them any more sales; in fact, all it will garner them is animosity. Advertising is the business of seduction; its hard to seduce your target when they are actively pissed off at you. Finally, I will again stress: consent. That is the key to legitimate Internet advertising. There are lots of ways to get it and none of them are very hard. You just have to offer something just enticing enough to get people to want to receive email from you. P.S. Your money is probably much better spent using an existing ad service like Google AdWords. Check it out. - -- Tobias DiPasquale 7A79 308C 0354 EA9C 7807 ED83 03C9 9E01 148E 7D01 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (Darwin) iD8DBQFBt69IA8meARSOfQERAtktAKCUnhnB8vopC4gJr31dtqE/f5Te1wCfQYpQ KRYthkGM9cD9F2Cl+LXXncs= =ea/a -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
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