Spam! No one likes spam. No one wants more spam in their inbox. No one wants to be know as a “spammer”, especially to their Internet Service Provider (ISP).

So, what is spam?

According to the Bureau of Consumer Protection, spam is:

“If the message contains only commercial content, its primary purpose is commercial and it must comply with the requirements of CAM-SPAM.”

Your email must comply with the following in order to be viewed as compliant.

“1. Don’t use false or misleading header information.
Your email address, the reply address and your domain and business name must be accurate.

2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.

3. Identify the message as an ad.
The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.

4. Tell recipients where you’re located.
Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.

5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.

6. Honor opt-out requests promptly.
Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.
The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.”

So how do you violate the CanSpam Act?

Let’s say I attend a networking event that allows me to place my business cards on a common “networking table.” You come along and pick up my card, go back to your office, and add me to your email database. Since we didn’t meet, you don’t have any reasonable expectation that I would be interested in receiving your emails.

Most small business owners start out by putting email addresses into their Outlook, or desktop email program. If that’s how you are handling your email contacts, you MUST include your address and a visible method of opting out of your emails. It can be as simple as telling your recipient that they may unsubscribe at any time by replying with unsubscribe in the subject line. The trouble with this is that many small business owners don’t want to hurt your feelings by asking to be taken off your list. An easier way for them to deal with this is to hit the “Report Spam” button. If you get too many complaints your ISP could severely reduce your ability to send email.

The other problem is something like this. This actually happened to me. I met someone at a networking event. They put me on their email list. They actually had an opt-out method I used to unsubscribe. However, the person who put me into the email database wasn’t the person who received my unsubscribe. I was continually put back into the database, as my card was continually picked up at networking events. You must honor the request of those who wish to unsubscribe to your email list.

Lastly, if you are using Outlook or something like it to handle your email list, don’t CC everyone on your list. Send the email to yourself and BCC the recipients. If all those copied on the email can see all the other addresses your chances of seeing a “Report Spam” action taken on your email increase dramatically.

The long and short of it is, you need a service that is recognized as an industry standard in email delivery, like Constant Contact or Get Response. These services are compliant with the CanSpam act  and can handle a growing email list.

I used to belong to a women’s networking group that had a list of approximately 800 women. The list had to be broken down into lists of no more than 50 and each list sent separately. After the sixth go ’round with the lists of 50, the ISP shut down our ability to send out any further emails. It took a lot of time and patience to get them to give back email access.

These services run around $15 to $18 a month to start. They allow you to collect email addresses through a form on your website or social media site. Of course you’ll want to offer an incentive for people to opt-in, but that’s another blog post…

I was asked this week to review an affiliate program where you sell access to a “Lead Generation” software that uses search results to “harvest and extract content” from targeted websites. The software then takes that information and puts it into a “comma separated value” document you can open in Excel and manipulate. For an additional charge you can use their robocall phone system, which I assume makes those calls we all love to receive from no one we know.

So what’s the problem with this? It depends on your values as to whether you would want to use a tool like this.

When I program websites, I go to great lengths to make sure the email address of my client is not put on the site that makes it easy for software like I’ve just described to “harvest” (and that’s a word you don’t want to use with your Constant Contact or GetResponse representative) email addresses. Usually, if you want your email on the site, I’d program it this way: debra (at) syndicatingyourcontent (dot) com. This method delivers the email to you, but makes it impossible for the software to recognize this as an email address.

These programs look for the specific code and/or the email format. When they find the code they take it and that’s how you get so much spam. Spam is the reason why we try not to put email addresses, in a recognizable form, on your websites. Instead we use contact forms.

These programs also extract the content from your website. Your content can be used on fake websites that are built for the specific purpose of creating inbound links to the spammers sites and to feed off your keyword rich content. This is called “scraping”, and trust me, it’s not fun when someone scrapes your site and steals your content so they can make money.

Unfortunately I had to deliver the news to my friend that lead generation software used in this manner is not something I would advise anyone to invest in. Using software like this could hurt your business more than support your business. After all, if enough of us hit the “Report Spam” button on your email, your internet service provider (ISP) could stop you from sending email. Is that what you want?

In the next blog post I’ll share with you how you can make sure I don’t hit the “Report Spam” button on your email.

Previous Post in an ongoing series on email marketing and list building:  Marketing with Email

When you create email messages to send, do like the Boy Scouts and “Be Prepared.” If you take the time, you can really develop some great tools to help you in preparing a compelling email.

Marketing Tools

Folder – create a folder on your computer and in print form for “email marketing” and keep ideas you have for future campaigns there. Save favorite emails there you get from others, too, as inspiration. You can use these as templates to create your own unique messages.

Headlines – Start a Microsoft Word or text document where you list favorite headlines and ideas for future headlines. Check Google for sites that offer tips on creating compelling headlines.

PS – People like to head straight to this area first, many gurus say. So create a document in your email marketing folder with favorite “PS” remarks; special sales, freebies, etc.

Guarantee – Ditto with guarantees. Which guarantees are listed on items you’ve purchased recently? Use these as starters. They attracted you!

Reference Guides – Keep handy reference sites like Dictionary.com or favorite encyclopedias book marked in a special Favorites folder on your computer. Keep print editions available nearby, too!

With the right bunch of marketing tools gathered ahead, you can “Be Prepared.” Start gathering your arsenal for great email marketing campaigns.

Previous Post in an ongoing series on list building and email marketing: Constant Contact As Your Email Service

A popular way for companies to communicate directly with consumers today is to use email. One of the most popular email services is Constant Contact.

Email serves a variety of functions including sales promotions and being a means of education about products and services. Messages also can include branding with logos and / or tag lines, and they can offer direct response tools like reply links, emails, telephone and fax numbers.

Basic email message writing comes across much better with skill that can be learned. Main focus should be placed on the tone of speech and grammatical language in the body of the message.

Points which should be remembered for writing the email

• The subject line should be exciting, making the reader want to open the mail and read the further text.
• Keep the subject line brief.
• Make sure to include details about the sender to comply with spamming laws. Check Spamcop or other “anti-spam” sites in your favorite search engine for more info.
• Develop the body of the email; i.e. the message, with a good introduction followed by well-described paragraphs. Avoid hype and misleading readers.
• Use your email spelling and grammar check tools. And don’t “shout” or use all capital letters.

Practice and read emails that come your way. Learn to write messages that you’d like to receive and improve your communications.

Do you have some tips to share? Please feel free to comment.

This is the final post in a series of fifteen, sharing how you can build your email subscriber list. I know this can be a bit overwhelming, so take these 15 suggestions (first five, second five) and look at what you can do yourself. Then,

1. Include a “Sign Up” button in your newsletter. If you’re using plain text instead of HTML, be sure to provide a text link to your subscription page. You may feel that this is not required because the subscriber is already on your list, but remember that readers will forward your newsletters to others, or reprint them online. Make it easy for them to subscribe!
2. Add a squeeze page. A squeeze page has one goal − to acquire opt-ins and build your list. Think of it as a mini-sales letter to go along with your subscription or opt-in gift. It should feature a strong headline and a couple of powerful benefits that should make subscribers salivate to sign up! Once created, use a service such as WordTracker to find hundreds of targeted keywords, and promote your offer using pay-per-click advertising from Google, MSN and Yahoo. Now that should make a splash!
3. Include testimonials on your squeeze page. This is crucial. Put one or two strong testimonials from satisfied customers on your squeeze page. This can be in any format, but you may find that multimedia (audio or video) is more “believable” and inspires more people to action. To further enhance believability, get permission to use actual customer names, locations and/or urls (Don’t use “Bob K, FL”). Add a note inviting others to participate. After all, it’s free publicity!
4. Blog religiously. Blogging is a great way to communicate with prospects and potential customers, and creates a nice synergy with your email marketing. Be sure to include your newsletter sign-up form on each page of your blog. You can start a free blog at Blogger or WordPress.
5. Post on other blogs. Post thoughtful comments and information on similar blogs with a link to your squeeze or opt-in pages. Also comment on others’ blogs through trackbacks. In most cases, your comments will be posted on their blogs with a link back to your site. This is an easy way to generate new traffic and subscribers, and get your brand out there!