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FIB - Scams 101 - Ye Olde Archives
Posted By: Bill Carton - the Roadie <wcarton@flash.net> In Response To: 10,000 customer emails just dropped into my lap... now what?? (Diana)
Friday, 12 May 2006, at 9:03 a.m.
> Honest, I'm not sure the best way to proceed with this.
Asking first is a great idea.
> I am going to be working with a young direct sales company. They have two
> databases of people who've either a) requested info about becoming a
> distributor or b) who've ordered products from the website.
And when their addresses were shared, what did the privacy policy (if any) say the addresses would be used for? If nothing, was there *any* mention of a newsletter at the time?
> These 10,000 names & email addresses are just sitting on someone's
> computer. The company's VP of Sales realizes that they should be
> CONTACTING these people regularly - that it's foolish not to follow up on
> these leads.
Agreed, but those addresses should have been collected with the owner's informed consent that they would be used for followup marketing. The FTC has said for purposes of telephone solicitation, that an inquiry expires in 90 days. In other words, you can't mine ancient phone numbers for product inquiries and pester them forever with telemarketing calls under the EBR (existing business relationship) exemption.
> Which is where I come in. I will publish a newsletter to both groups of
> people.
> Logistical question here about the FIRST EMAIL we send out. What should it
> contain? What approach should we take?
It can contain an invitation to join the newsletter list, but should not contain marketing. That can help defend you against the INEVITABLE spam complaints. Nobody should be added to the newsletter list unless they take positive, affirmative action to join. Ignoring the email should result in them NOT being added to any list.
Here are some generally accepted network owner's guidelines on list management:
http://www.mail-abuse.com/an_listmgntgdlines.html
Doing anything more runs the risk of many more spam complaints, and loss of connectivity. You're assuming permission to email addresses without having explicit informed and confirmed consent, whcih is always risky. What if the address is so stale that it has a new owner. You don't want to be spamming even ONE person in that situation.
> Should it basically be an invitation to join the newsletter? Maybe where
> we describe what benefits they'll get by joining and tell them we won't
> email them again unless they opt-in?
Exactly!
> Or do we send an actual first issue so they can see what they'd get,
> describe the deal inside, and let them opt-out, or what? I mean, we
> legitimately have their names/email addresses, but these people did not
> sign up for a newsletter because one did not exist previously.
You have some addresses, but you're not guaranteed they are owned by the same person today. Also, and even more important, you're doing what's called REPURPOSING the list. If the list wasn't collected with the understanding it would be used for a newsletter, then it's not a very valuable list. The original conditions were set up poorly, and sometimes you just have to accept that what looks like a valuable asset is really a risky pile of dog-doo.
> I don't want to spam anyone, or be perceived as doing so, but DO want to
> maximize the number of people who allow us to send them the newsletter.
> Advice is MUCh appreciated!
Take it from the perspective of a small network owner and engineer. Your desire for a large newsletter list is overshadowed by people's expectations of privacy and informed consent on today's Internet. You are asking exactly the right questions, and the link I gave is a good summary of the way to properly collect addresses today and manage the list. Check out almost any sales site nowadays and see what they're publishing for privacy policies and newletter subscription processes. If the process doesn't include a confirmation step, to make sure the OWNER of the address is the onw entering it on a form, then they're not using current best-practices, since nobody wants their newsletter subscription process to be subverted and used as a harassment engine. Forged, fake sign-ups are trivially avoided by using closed-loop confirmation, and lists that aren't doing this simple thing are just one spam report away from being shut down.
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