Keith Shirley

Why do some people freak out when they receive spam? There seems to be a weird kind of joy of the hunt within Irish web “guru” circles  when they receive a spam mail.

As an Irish business, God forbid that you should send a spam mail to any of the well known bloggers or twitter users. It might even be that the mail you send is relatively innocent but it probably won’t matter. You’ll be tarred and feathered in public from people on high horses.

I’m not saying it’s right to spam. The Irish government agrees that it’s an increasing problem and a recent news report talks about how the fines can now hit 250,000 Euro. The trouble with the new laws is that I doubt they will be enforced. What we need to do is help everyone understand what they can do to avoid sending spam:

• Get peoples permission to send them mail. Do it at the same time they sign up for an account if you can.
• If people sign up over the web – makes sure it’s really them by getting the software to send an automated mail asking for confirmation – This is called double opt-in
• Make it easy for them to be taken off your mailing lists. Make sure that they stay off
• If your customer database has not got email addresses or your customers permission to send them mails then phone them and ask them. Yes it’ll take ages BUT a real call will give you the opportunity to keep the communication channel open with your customers. Don’t be afraid to speak with your customers.
• Just because you don’t receive much spam does not mean that they don’t. Are you really going to be sending them information that is useful to them? Even with their permission – a boring sales pitch will just get deleted. Ask yourself why you want to send mails.

Update via Mulleynet - Denise Cox’s Blog has some great details on the new regulations.

Update2: They say when you look back on things you always have 20/20 vision. I’d like to point out that my link to Damiens blog was not meant to point the finger at him. In that particular post I agree with him – The PR company should have just apologised, removed him from their list and do better next time. When they try to convey the attitude that you should be greatful for being spammed they are damaging their own customers image.

I get 1000’s of spam messages a day and they do annoy me but the piles of junk mail that come through my letterbox at home annoy me more. Dan Sullivan has an interesting post on his blog about how people react differently depending on how they receive their spam.

Please make sure to read the comments for this post – there are a number of interesting answers.

You’ve just sent your complete customer list to your competitor. Not only that you’ve told them what your current best offers are so they can then follow up with those customers directly and offer them a cheaper price.

No way!, you say. Well you may have done that multiple times over the past year and not realised it.

Last week I received a monthly newletter from an IT company with a list of their current sales prices. That in itself is not a big issue. What surprised me was that when I looked at the TO: address on the email it had a huge (HUGE!!!!) list of, presumably all, their other business customers. Ignoring any data protection laws for the moment – this is

• Bad for business
• Good for your competitors (I presume you are all signed up to your competitors mailing lists)
• Very embarrassing (especially for an IT company)
• Putting you at risk of being brought to court – suppose it was an email for a support group on some personal matter.

There are a couple of ways that you can avoid this:

- The easiest way is to use the BCC option of your mail client. BCC means Blind Carbon Copy and it allows you to send mail to numerous people without them knowing about each other. In some clients it’s always available. In Outlook click the TO button when writing a mail and you will see BCC at the bottom of the window that appears. Microsoft have some extra info on using BCC with Outlook on their website. For other clients – dig around in the help file. If you can’t find it then let me know in the comments and I’ll add some extra info.

- A good newsletter should try to be personal. i.e You should at least use the persons name. What you need for this is an option called mail merge. It allows you to create a template and then automatically fill in details. It has the advantage that the mails get sent one by one and it looks nicer when it works. When it breaks it looks really bad – no one likes to receive a mail with Dear firstname lastname at the top. Unless you are sure of what you are doing I suggest to avoid dealing with mail merge directly.

- To do mailing lists properly I suggest you learn how to use one of the professional tools available. I can recommend Mailchimp and Toddle. These are easy to use web based tools that will allow you to easily send professional looking mails.

Proper mailing list managers will handle failed messages for you and make it easy for people to remove themselves from the list. The mails they create look much more professional than most people can manage themselves. Try them out and let me know of any successes or problems you have.