Using Opt-In Promotional Email

Let's start by talking about the difference between opt-in and opt-out. Opt-out email is what you send people who didn't check a box that said "I don't want to get email from you." In other words, you are assuming the right to spam them unless they specifically tell you not to. All the MLM, porn, and penis enlargement spammers make this same assumption. If you are on their ethical level, go ahead and use opt-out email marketing, the kind that says, "You are receiving this email because…" and offers a method of unsubscribing either directly by email or by clicking onto a Web site that offers an unsubscribe utility of some sort. Perhaps you feel that this "opt-out is bad" attitude is wrong, and that it is good business to send promotional email to people who bought a product or service from you or took some other action that put their email address into your hands, and didn't bother to specifically tell you not to send them promotional email. Perhaps, in a world where nasties weren't using email to promote garbage, you would be right, but we live in a world where they have poisoned opt-out email so badly that no legitimate business can use it without at least some customers or potential customers getting offended by all unsolicited email.

The only legitimate, totally accepted mass marketing use of email currently available is the "opt-in" list, and the people to whom you can send this kind of email without negative repercussions are those who have knowingly opted in to your own company's offerings either by sending email to you asking to be placed on your email list or by entering their email address in a form on your Web site and clicking a "subscribe" button. Even the "subscribe" button method is not foolproof; a common online problem is pranksters who subscribe people they don't like to hundreds of email lists, which forces the victims of this kind of prank to spend hours or days unsubscribing, and tends to make those victims angry at the companies from whom they get all that email. The way you protect your reputation from this sort of shenanigan is to require all subscribers to respond positively to a "Did you really mean to subscribe to our list?" confirmation email you send to them. Adding the confirmation email to the subscription process makes it, in industry parlance, "double opt-in." Once someone has replied positively to the confirmation email, you can be reasonably certain that they really want to hear from you, at the frequency and in the manner specified in your original sign-up information.

Another major courtesy for your email subscribers is to give them a choice between plain text email, which they are likely to prefer if they are on slow dialup connections or in countries where Internet access is charged by the minute, and HTML email with pictures, which they may prefer if they have unlimited, broadband Net access (Figure 6-1 shows a signup page with many choices).

Figure 6-1. Many choices available, including choice of delivery format. This makes readers happy.

Yet another courtesy is to make it easy for subscribers to alter or even cancel their subscriptions. The best way to do this is to put a line like this at the bottom of each email you send to a subscriber:

Click Here to change or cancel your subscription.

Honesty with subscribers is also important. If they sign up to receive a weekly software review, that's what you must give them. You can't suddenly decide to send them a daily list of "red-hot inkjet cartridge specials," and say, "Well, you opted in to receive email from us," as a justification for this obnoxious intrusion. Selling your email lists is another edgy area. It looks like a good source of short-term income on the surface, but customers tend to dislike it immensely.

Once customers find you have violated their trust by abusing their email addresses in any way, they are unlikely to trust anything you tell them, and if they don't trust you they probably won't buy from you. Worse, if the people whose trust you abuse are involved in any online email or chat groups, they may spread tales of your perceived perfidy far and wide. You are far better off, in the long run, having a small but loyal group of email subscribers than having a huge list of people who get email from you and your business associates that they don't really want.