Is your small business spamming?
Above: Stop Spam–and Stop Spamming!
I manage a few different blogs and use a professional autoresponder to manage my email–which means that people can subscribe to my email list but that they have to opt-in (twice) to verify they want to receive emails from me.
Usually I send a monthly newsletter and then there are times when I have a favor to ask–rarely do I send them something that I think they would be interested in such as a product or service.
So, this week I was surprised when a person on my list reported me as a spammer.
It wasn’t a big deal but in the six years that I have maintained a list, this is the first time that has happened–and it not only confused me but also pissed me off because that person had to jump through two hoops to get anything from me anyway–and the email was soliciting their help.
Today people are confused as to what constitutes spam.
Spam is junk email–you’ve seen them, promises of Viagra or other offers (sometimes explicit emails) that clutter up your email box.
Spammers tend to buy email lists from groups or collect them with spam bots that crawl the web and pick up email addresses when they are posted on a website or appear somewhere in the code of a website.
Today there are laws that govern electronic mail–and a business needs to adhere to them.
In the past, people signed up for my emails via a sign up form at my speaking engagements but today I ask them to sign up via a form on my websites or email them an invitation to do so.
I am compliant but I can’t tell you how many businesses are not.
In fact, I have someone I know that spams me every month with an email that does not allow me to unsubscribe easily (which is also a requirement).
Now, I’ve been spammed by small businesses whose owners I never met and that think there is nothing wrong with emailing me–they are breaking the law and annoying me.
They want to sell me something, fail to target me correctly, or spam me from my blog forms because they think I will be interested–but they are seriously mistaken.
Unless they got my permission, or I actually signed up for their emails, they are spammers and if they keep up their wicked (or ignorant) ways they can actually get into trouble from the FTC.
So, is your business spamming?
You better stop and get complaint.
I’ll be exploring autoresponders soon (due to popular request) but in the meantime, check out what happened to this spammer and read the CAN-SPAM Act Compliance Guide for Business.
You can also check out the FTC Spam site.
And finally, do everyone a favor–don’t mark something as spam when it isn’t–just click the unsubscribe link at the bottom.
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[...] wrote about this before in, Is Your Small Business Spamming?, but I bring it up again to touch on a couple of other [...]