The politics of spamming
8/7/2007 6:00:00 AM
by Nestor Arellano
IT Business has a story today about commercial email inundating the inbox of subscribers. Not only are companies competing with their competitors for the perfect placement in the inbox but they are stepping on their own toes to do it.
Michael Peddemore, president of Wizard IT, is quoted “the flooding of so-called “grey area spam” is so rampant that some recipients receive up to 20 offerings a day from the same marketing company“. Grey area spam referring to email communications where consent is given or inferred but abused by a mailer.
This type of activity can potentially cause subscribers to declare “Email Bankruptcy” due to solicited and personal communications burying them under a flood of email that they will never get to.
Suggestions on preventing the overmailed feeling:
- Make your opt-in clear to your subscribers
- Respect the wishes of your users – make it easy to unsubscribe from your communications, all of them not just one at a time (use a preference centre to achieve this)
- Employ a recency frequency strategy for user contact (i.e. no more then once a day or 3 times a week)
- Build a publishing calendar with mailings tailored to user preferences
- Use dynamic content to build a custom newsletter tailored for each user, instead of sending a separate message for each subscription or segment.
Are you feeling overmailed or do you want to share some suggestions about preventing overmailing?
Share them with us by email at contact or leave a comment.
