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…

1. You could publish your testimonials or endorsements in autoresponder format if you don’t have the room in your ad copy. It’s more effective to include all of them.
2. Provide back issues of your e-zine archives in auto- responder format. This will give your subscribers and web site visitors easy access to them.
3. Publish your entire web site in autoresponder format. Sometimes visitors don’t have enough time read your entire site. They could print it out and read it offline.
4. You could offer your ebook in autoresponder format. Your visitors won’t have to download it or have the software to read it right away.
5. You could publish the terms and conditions to any business transactions in autoresponder format. This could include return policies, purchases, refunds etc.

1. Collect leads with your autoresponder. You will get an e-mail digest of everyone’s e-mail addresses who requests information from your autoresponder.
2. Publish a price list of all the products and services that you offer. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material.
3. Publish free reports in autoresponder format. The reports should be related to your business or web site. Giving away free stuff will quickly increase your traffic.
4. Collect vital customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey in autoresponder format. This type of information will help you serve them better.
5. Instead of answering every customer question that’s e-mailed to you, publish “Frequently Ask Questions” in autoresponder format. This will save time and money.

Offering free things to your website visitors is one marketing method that often results in a lot of sales. Free courses that are delivered via email are very popular, and people sign up for such courses on a regular basis to learn more about a topic of interest to them. These courses are best maintained and delivered with the use of autoresponders.

An autoresponder can be set up to send out a series of lessons for an email course. The lessons can be set for distribution at specific intervals. You determine how often the lessons for the course are sent to the people who have signed up for it. Email courses are very different from traditional courses, web based courses, or any other type of course.

There is no student and instructor interaction. The instructor writes the information out, puts each lesson in an autoresponder series, sets the timing for the lessons, and the rest is automated. You can opt to have lessons delivered daily, every other day, every three days, or any other time frame that you think works best for your email students.

Email courses are commonly used to sell products and services. For instance, if you sell widgets, you might develop a course that teaches people how to use widgets or how to care for their widget. Experts agree that an email course can be written for almost any product that you can imagine – if you put enough thought into it.

Start by determining what your course will be about, and how long it should be. If the course should be delivered every other day for two weeks, you know that you would need seven lessons. Write the lessons, and load them in the autoresponder. Set the interval for each lesson, which in this case would be 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13.

This means that the first lesson would be delivered one day after the person has requested the course, and the second lesson would be delivered three days after the person has requested the course, and so on. The interval for each lesson is set for the number of days after the person has signed up Make sure that everything is spelled right, and that your sentences are grammatically correct. You want the lessons to look and sound as professional as possible.

Next, simply advertise the email address that will activate the autoresponder. Make sure that you run a test first, sending each lesson to yourself. This will allow you to see what your email students will see when they sign up!

Ask any veteran Internet marketer about converting visitors into sales, and you’ll get one answer: it’s all about the follow-up.

Truly, it’s more than just increasing the volume of traffic that gets to visit your site. After all, a good 98% of your daily visitors, at the average, won’t decide to purchase your products or rent your services. But that’s not to say that they won’t be interested in the same offer tomorrow, or that they won’t be interested in future offers.

Hence, it has become necessary to “capture” these “leads” so that they may be informed of upcoming offerings, or better yet, so that you could warm them up for your current offers. This can be done by employing an opt-in system that would invite them to subscribe to a mailing list. By gathering their names and email addresses, with their permission of course, you would be able to contact them periodically with informative materials, usually carried out through the use of an eZine or a newsletter, as well as occasional distribution of freebies to win their favor for a possible sale.

There would be no problem if you’re dealing with ten or twenty subscribers, as you could write to them individually. But such number isn’t sustainable by a long shot, however. You should aim for a mailing list that would reach the thousands. And that would make it difficult for you to prepare personalized emails.

The crux of an ideal mailing list, therefore, is an efficient autoresponder system that would cater to your every need with regards to the matter.

A mailing list of considerable size powered by a good autoresponder system consistently provides some generous earnings for many Internet marketers the world over. A lot of online businessmen can rake a profit from their mailing lists alone.

But what is an autoresponder system? An autoresponder system is like a digital secretary. It will take care of your subscribers by providing for an opt-in system that would allow them to subscribe to your mailing list. An autoresponder system would also take care of the distribution of emails to your subscriber base.

You could simply prepare your messages in advance, program them in the autoresponder, and preset the intervals by which the said messages will be delivered. You could even separate your subscribers into various groups. One group would be for those who have yet to order, for example, and the other is for those who have already made a purchase. This would allow you to use two different approaches in dealing with them.

Also, a good autoresponder system would help build the customer’s, prospective or actual, trust in your services. With a good autoresponder, you could provide for an efficient technical support program. If your client would email you a question about one of your products, for example, you could preset the autoresponder to reply with a general FAQ so that he may be properly guided.

Not all autoresponders are built the same way, however, and much care should be exercised in choosing the right one perfect for your particular needs. Here are ten questions you need to ask before you decide enrolling for an autoresponder service:

1. How many accounts can you create with their system? Some business plans would require you to have different accounts for different product.
2. How many lists can you build? There are also some business plans that would require different lists for different groups of clients?
3. How many follow-up messages can you preset?
4. How many subscribers can the system hold? And correspondingly, how many subscribers can the system respond to?
5. How much customization is allowed? You need to make your subscribers feel special somehow, so the names included in your message, as well as some parts of the message itself, should be customizable.
6. How can the system gather prospective subscribers? The process should be simple and convenient, otherwise, the target’s patience will just be tried.
7. Will you be able to send your messages in .html and .doc formats?
8. Will you be able to track your subscribers for the purpose of target marketing?
9. Is the scheduling system fully automated?
10. Is the autoresponder easy to use?

If the autoresponder service you are considering favorably satisfies all the questions above, and it is being offered at a reasonable price, then it would be wise to grab that deal as soon as you can.

Remember, if you’re running an online business, a good autoresponder should be one of your primary investments. It could be the key to an excellent conversion rate.

Check out GetReponse.com or Aweber.com.

Alright! For long enough I’ve just posted info to this blog. It’s time for me to come out of my shell and just talk to you.

Gotta tell you…I made a giant blunder with my autoresponder and I’d like to share the lessons learned. I use GetResponse.com. I like that I can create my e-mails in html, paste them into my campaign and send them off. There are many features I like about GetResponse.com.

There’s also Constant Contact. It’s got a very nice feature, templates. It’s very user friendly, and you can create your campaign in html, then paste it in as well. There’s a 60 day free trial you can use to test drive an e-mail campaign.

Anyway, back to my blunder. I composed my autoresponders for my monthly newsletter. I didn’t notice the “html preview” link, which would have shown me my mistakes right off. This was mistake #1.

To compound matters, I didn’t (as I always preach) subscribe to my own newsletter. Mistake #2. If I had I would have seen immediately that my links were DEAD!!!! YIKES!!! Fortunately, for me, a friend pointed it out (I just entered a bunch of subscriptions I secured at a trade show) and I had just subscribed myself, so I saw my errors immediately.

The moral of the story…preview and test. Why is it some lessons are harder learned than others???

Deb