A very nice web designer from a small town in North Carolina sent out a promotional email campaign for her client, a local beauty salon. It invited recipients to "come in and get a manicure" at a discount. It was her client’s first email campaign.
Immediately after she sent her campaign, we got an email from a very, very angry man about how "this woman is using MailChimp to spam me." Hmm, it is a little weird for a man to be getting an email to come in for a manicure.
I checked out the man’s email address, and noticed the domain was for an ISP located in the same small town as the sender.
That’s too much of a coincidence to be spam, but I suspended her account temporarily (just to be safe) and investigated…
I asked him, "any chance your wife signed up for this newsletter?"
Nope. No wife. No kids. And nobody who would ever have access to his computer. "She obviously purchased an email list from somewhere," he tells me.
Now, if some local plumber sends an email to 3,000,000 recipients, that idiot bought a list. But this woman sent to a couple dozen people, with no other complaints. Nothing out of line for a local salon. Hmm.
He also tells me that his email address has been dormant for years, and he was shocked to even be receiving any messages to it. Hmm. Did she scrape the address from some old website? Did she buy an old list, or get some list from the local Chamber of Commerce (another very common source of spam complaints)?
I sent the woman some questions about her client’s list. She was mortified about being accused as a spammer, and went to her client to find out what was going on.
The client had absolutely no idea why she was being accused of spamming. "It was only sent to my clients" she says.
After hours and hours of back-and-forth emails and phone conversations with the sender, her client and the complainer, we finally figured it out. The client simply dumped her entire Outlook Address book and imported it into her email list. She figured the only people in her address book were her clients, since that was her "office computer."
But the complainer wasn’t a client. So how did he end up in her address book?
Turns out he used to be the tech support admin for her ISP, way back before they were bought out by a bigger ISP (hence the old, dormant email address that he hasn’t used in years).
We resolved the issue, and the complainer, now an admin at a much larger ISP, thanked us for taking his complaint so seriously. If this were handled differently, or if he wasn’t so patient, he would have had the power to blacklist the sender (and MailChimp) at his ISP. Whew.
Time Wasted: One day
Lesson Learned: Don’t just dump your entire address book into your email subscriber list, for Pete’s sake. You’re bound to have a handful of email addresses from your ISP, tech
support, Amazon sales, all the free trials you’ve ever signed up for,
etc. If you don’t sit down and really weed through that address book to remove these other email addresses, you’ll inevitably get reported for spamming.
[...] Here’s a real life example of this happening to a MailChimp customer. [...]
I think it is profoundly stupid and unproductive to have a system in place that enables some individual recipient of an email to trigger an entry into a spam list. I get responses back from individuals with some frequency who have forgotten that they signed up … not a check box .. signed up to receive a periodic newsletter. In my view, the power wielded by organizations operating blacklists clearly does not provide due process and borders on illegal restraint of trade. Putting a sender on the list as a result of multiple reports of spam … and the bar should be high for automatic inclusion .. is a lot different than giving that power to one or two disgruntled people. A very significant proportion of the spam problem involves thousands or millions of emails and at least hundreds of complaints. It certainly isn’t caused by a beauty salon sending out 25 emails no matter what the origin.
@Tom:
Great feedback, Tom. In general, the major ISPs already work the way you think things should work. The “threshold” to get blacklisted for user-reported complaints is reasonably high.
In the story above, the complainer wasn’t using the “report spam” button, or any blacklisting system. He called me. And he happened to run an ISP, so had the power to block our servers from reaching thousands of recipients in that city.
It’s scary to think that one person holds that kind of blocking power, but keep in mind he called us to investigate first. And that’s the case with all ISPs I’ve ever dealt with.
So long as you’re sending emails people requested, and you do your very best to minimize “surprises,” you will never have to worry about exceeding any blacklist complaint thresholds.
[...] your entire email address book and assume they all want to receive email newsletters from you. Address book dumps are full of old email addresses, and are one of the most common reasons I see senders get blocked. [...]
I’m wanting to use MailChimp to improve my marketing as my business is now expanding to rowers world wide. My website seems to get many hits almost all from servers.
What’s going on.
I seems strange that most Rowing Clubs have at least one email contact there to be used, not abused. According the the Terms & Conditions a prospect can not be emailed as I could be reported as a spammer. All I’m wanting to do is make initial contact to inform and promote my products and hopefully gain subscription approval [optin] for future newsletter and business
On the internet, websites and email addresses are so abundant, do the owners want to be contacted with legitimate correspondence or do we refrain from all attempts to make contact in fear of being accused ,a spammer
What are ISPs, really doing to physically find these spammers? Too much spam is getting through.
What are we paying for?
Tracking software is free and readily available to us.
My point is, why are we threatened with blacklisting and denied the use of email marketing etc when attempting to operate a genuine business.
Confused
Rob
Hi Rob, the issue isn’t as bad as you think. If there is a business owner out there, and you want to send a one-to-one, personal email to him/her about your product, that’s not spam. But if you try to do that en masse, it’s spam. It gets worse when people try to do it en masse by using bots and spiders to “scrape” emails from the internet. That’s a special breed of spam I personally call “evil.”
I publish a book review site and have a list of about 300 people to whom I’ve been sending a monthly email about the new reviews for the month. These people, composed mostly of writers we have reviewed, writers who have requested a review, publishers, agents, publicists and friends of the genre, have been receiving these emails for almost three years now. In that time, I’ve had requests to remove exactly three people from the list, which I did immediately.
My problem is that no one opted in, but the mail has been on-going for quite a while (and the list is miniscule). I’ve been sending the mail one message at a time, individually, every month and really want to go to a service, but I can’t rely on the opt-in thing. Am I out of luck? Can I use your service with my existing list, or do I need to keep spending several hours every month to send out my lone email?
I’d suggest setting up a list in MailChimp. Then, continue to send from your own system as you’ve been doing for three years. But now, include a link to your MailChimp signup list, asking people to go and subscribe to your new system, which will make your newsletters easier to manage, better designed, etc. You might offer a book as a prize or something. Do this for several campaigns, and when you’re ready to wind down your old email operations, your notes can increase the urgency to “go subscribe to my new list, because these are about to stop.” You get the gist. Don’t just switch immediately. Let people move over on their own free will. It’ll be better for your deliverability too, because a sudden switch is suspicious to spam filters out there that’ve been trained to receive emails from your old system.
Hi
I think it’s a great system. I get enough spam in my inbox and I certainly don’t want to add to anyone else’s junk mail.
I run a funding information and resources website for non-profit voluntary and community groups. I send out email alerts when there’s new information on the website. For the last several years people have subscribed to receive these alerts individually by emailing me, I’ve replied individually and added them to one of my distribution lists (I started doing lists alphabetically – seemed like a good idea at the time).
Over the years the lists have grown organically, people have moved on, changed jobs, changed email addresses etc. and the whole thing was aking up inordinate amounts of time.
Then I dicovered Mailchimp. I added a subscription link to the website and on a couple of alerts asked people to resubscribe. This was moderately successful. I then merged and cleaned up my lists as best I could and used Mailchimp to send a LAST CHANCE email asking them to resubscribe and stating this was a one time only list I wouldn’t be using again. Within a few days I had loads of resubscriptions. I deleted the old list. And now I have one lovely clean, current list for email alerts.
Sending out alerts takes lots less time. I’m also usi ng Mailchimp for another much smaller list I where needmake sure everyone reads the info – so the “who opened” feature is great.
I am loving Mailchimp.
Cathy x
I will say…so far I like mail chimp, however after reading through this stuff…I too am not afraid I’ll be considered a “spammer.” It almost sounds like you have to send out an individual message for it not to be spam…but then, why use mailchimp? We manage multiple lists when we do trade shows. We’ll send a single email out to the more “risky” group that didn’t put down that they wanted our services (still agreed to receive information from us). Was it that they were lazy and didn’t fill out the form completely, or do they not want that service? Is it not fair for a legitimate business to send out one email to that group? Then there is the group that says they do want our service. Well, the truth is, this is a trade show with a thousand other vendors. I’m sure after all is said and done, they get sick of receiving emails. But if we send 1 every two months or so…I don’t consider that spam. 1 complaint for every 1000 emails seems a bit high. I would think that many people just take the easy and lazy way out and simply hit spam. I really don’t get it. If they don’t want us to send them something by email…why do they put it down? I also don’t get why it seems so hard to try and do legitimate business either. It seems there is no way to truly win as a small business. I hope most of your comments are more so to scare those that truly do abuse the system and not those that truly work hard day and night as a small business owner trying to send information out to real customers.
Hi Shannon, it’s all about what “stage” your recipients are in at any particular time, and choosing the correct tool for contacting them at each stage.
Tools include:
Phone calls
Personal, one-to-one emails
CRMs, and automated sales
Email marketing
A lot of businesses (big and small!) confuse the tools, or try to say it’s all the same thing: “email.” But they’re all extremely different. Email marketing, which is what MailChimp was built for, is best when recipients are self-selected, and are interested in some content you have to offer. Videography tips? Party-planning advice? Videography trends in the age of MTV’s Super Sweet 16?
The email marketing we talk about at MailChimp is best for long term brand loyalty, not sales.
Use a CRM like Batchbook or Salesforce or Highrise (which we integrate with) to handle the one-to-one sales relationships (people you met at a tradeshow, who didn’t opt-in for email marketing, but have some kind of relationship with you).
In the list above, email marketing is probably the hardest one to implement, because it’s a very long term investment to grow a dedicated following (some tips for that).
If you don’t want people to use 3rd party lists you should say so prominently on your home page before you waste their time signing up.
Mailchimp’s policy on acceptable lists is paranoid. Targeted email marketing isn’t spam. The characteristics of spam are (1) It’s not relevant to your interests (2) You can’t identify the senders (3) You can’t stop it (4) It’s sent indiscriminately to thousands of addresses.
This is not the same as targeted mailing to appropriate individuals from an identifiable sender offering an opt-out function. People who respond by yelling ‘spam’ shouldn’t be allowed on the internet. They are the problem, not us.
Interesting opinion. Thanks for sharing.
But imho, that’s like a bank posting a sign on their front door that says, “No robbers allowed.”
While it may dissuade the ethical robbers from robbing the bank, it’s more likely to make the non-robbers worry that the bank has a robber problem.
The one thing that upsets me about SPAM reporting is most people will hit the SPAM button thinking it will just auto delete all future mailings. They do this in thinking it will just go away. In reality they just may have caused a small list to get suspended or disabled. The other side of the coin is, if you unsubscribe from a true SPAM email, you are simply verifying your e-mail is active thus allowing the true SPAMMERS to sell your info to another list. Running a computer business I tell all of my clients to never, never unsubscribe from a list. I tell them to delete it or create a rule using their e-mail software.
I run a total of 9 list for clients as well as mine for my business. I had an event and received 180 email addresses from people signing up. A week later I sent out an email about upcoming specials. 2 people clicked their SPAM button and my list was shut down. The only way MailChimp would turn it back on, was if I removed all of the e-mail addresses I imported, even though all of them actually signed permission to receive updates. I still use MailChimp however you are guilty in their eyes of trying to do bad things. This of course is from my own experience as I received another compliance email from a clients list of 10 people, which no one has ever unsubscribed, bounced or marked as Spam. I have sent 14 e-mails to that list so far. Now all of the sudden it is being questioned. Oh well, I guess I can always go back to Sending out E-mail using an Access Database.
Martin, a quick comment about your criteria for spam…
If you mass email about a product/service without permission, it is unsolicited email. It really doesn’t make a difference that YOU had some reason to target me…I didn’t ask for it.
If a business wants to reach out to me and include me in their marketing database, I’d want a personal phone call or email before being included on such a list. And if they’re uncomfortable calling me directly to ask for permission, then they probably shouldn’t be including me in the database anyway.
Benjamin,
Trust me, I understand the desire not to get “Spam.” I also fully agree with you that if you didn’t ask for it, it shouldn’t come to you. However…the user needs to take responsibility as well. If you did “sign up” for it…you should accept it. You can always change your mind if you want to by selecting unsubscribe. Hitting “Spam” should not be an option though.
As a small business owner, I HATE calling people. Its so intrusive. You never know when a bad time is for someone else. Email is simple. If they don’t want to read it, they delete it or click “unsubscribe.” Personal emails are fine but they also take a lot of time. I’m sorry, but I have a business to run, I can’t afford to make a personal email to everyone. The bottom line is, I’ll agree that people shouldn’t “buy” email lists or fish for them online, but if you don’t want your email to be used, don’t give it out! Especially if you are going to a trade show and they ask you for your email…DUH!!! Its a no brainer. Why do you think people give prizes away? People need to take a little responsibility…as do businesses.
Ben – why have you just ignored the rest of my comment and attempted to smear me by suggesting that I am, in your terms, a ‘robber’?
I agree with Martyn, I wanted to sign up with you folks but I don’t have each and every email verified. Furthermore, I do collect emails from industries relevant to our products.
Good luck MailChimp, I’m looking for a Good Ol Fashioned SPAM company, ready to download my lists and start sending out campaigns.
Martyn and Josh have a point. I am a new business owner and have been contacting people via phone for a few months. I want to expand into email marketing, monthly newletter, and montlhy seminar promotion using EventBrite (whose email support is inadequate). I have two classes of people: 1) People who have willingly exchanged business cards with me. 2) People contacted over the phone who have in the past requested information. I have not been asking these people for permission to send emails to them. I don’t see why sending an email or three with opt-out clearly visible is as much of a problem as MailChimp suggests, as long as I word the email carefully and honor their decision if they make one. I also don’t think sending emails until they opt-out is so bad, either. After, say, 3 emails, if they haven’t opted in, then I would remove them from my list. I am tired of my manual email options, and my CRM is limited in email functionality, which is why I looked at MailChimp. I make too many mistakes manually and it takes much longer than it should have to. I’m in favor of explicit opt-in, but I’ve got to get this business moving, and need to automate my current time-consuming, error-prone, and tracking-limited processes. Do I need to go elsewhere?
The topic of this article was how importing your entire address book will often include unintended email addresses that can get you reported for spam. Now the discussion is shifting a little, but it’s a good discussion to have…
If you’ve been collecting email and corresponding from people for many years (from your own email program or company CRM), you need to send them a personal note telling them that you’re starting up a more “official” newsletter, and that note should contain a link to your newsletter signup form.
There are two very big (technical, not ethical) reasons for this:
1) If you’ve been corresponding with them from your own email program, their spam filters have become “trained” to accept email from your company’s IP address(es). If you abruptly shift to an outside service (MailChimp, or any ESP or CRM), your deliverability will suffer. It’s better to send from the server that your recipients are used to, then get them to willingly opt-in at your ESP’s server, which will then “re-train” their spam filters to trust email from the new server.
2) If you *haven’t* been consistently sending to those contacts in your address book, it’s likely that a large portion of your contacts have changed their email addresses (people move, get fired, take new jobs, etc). So sending a message to a bunch of dead email addresses (especially if that message is slick and sales-y looking with pretty pictures and colors) raises red flags at receiving ISPs. Their postmaster teams will think you’ve purchased an old email list from some spammer. And it’s not like they conduct a thorough investigation to determine if you’re innocent or guilty. They’re dealing with billions of pieces of spam per day, and so are pretty trigger-happy with their “block this guy forever” button. When they hit that button, it’s *our* server that gets blocked (and sometimes, your domain name). If one of our IPs gets blocked, it’s not just your messages affected. It’s tens of thousands of senders.
(Mass) Email delivery is exponentially more complicated (and political!) than one-to-one email delivery, so it’s why we strongly recommend that your initial round of “hey, remember me? I’m starting a newsletter now, and would appreciate it if you signed up for it over here” messages were sent one-to-one, from your own servers.
I’m helping a friend run a music night in Oxford which is a lot of fun and gets some very interesting musicians in. We usually ask someone to collect email addresses on paper and quite often decipherment of the hand writing can be quite an ordeal. Quite often 2 email addresses have been added where there have been ambiguous characters.
This has been going on for 6 years and last month I found out that out of 550 emails that were on the list, over 200 were being returned – many were university students who had left and their accounts had expired, some were the kind of email address you would give someone if you didn’t want it sent your main account, and others are plainly made up, like “georgebush@hotmail.com”, and the rest were bad guesses from poor handwriting.
So it’s by no means a clean mailing list.
I spend a day or so cleaning up the list and hoovered up the returned emails, reducing the list from 550 to 350 addresses.
This month I sent out an email to the remaining email addresses and found that another 174 emails were returned, this time with a different message saying “Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list”, which I hadn’t seen in the previous emails. Most of them were from Hotmail addresses, some from Yahoo accounts, and others were from university accounts.
A few others had “Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 451 lowest numbered MX record points to local host”…
My main concern is that someone on the list is thinking that they are receiving spam and had the email blacklisted. Even though the message has a clear “unsubscribe” link at the bottom.
What’s the best course of action? Will Mailchimp help whittle out troublesome email addresses and clean up the list?
Kind regards,
Hugh
It’s probable that our network is more reputable than your ISP (for sending emails), but nothing’s going to help a bad list collection process. And I’m not trying to point the finger at you and call you bad in any way. But if there’s anything about the list collection part that would encourage people to give you bad addresses, nothing can really “clean” the list. The only way to tell if an email is truly clean is to send to it and see if it’s rejected. But if you send too many emails that get rejected, you look like a spammer with an old list. The holistic solution is in the list collection process. If I were at an event, and someone walked up to me and asked me for my email address, I’d feel a little pressured to give it. Upon receiving the email (assuming I gave you my true email address), I might then report it as spam, or unsubscribe immediately. Both of which will ding your reputation. But if you leave a notebook or collection device around somewhere and let people sign up on their own free will, you may have fewer problems.
I am not a spam NAZI, however, I think Ben has missed an opportunity to help educate the senders, thus hurting his company in the process. I did not see Ben once mention the term Unsolicited Commercial Email, also known as spam.
Several of the senders seem to think they are entitled to send at least one email before it is considered SPAM. The fundamental thing being overlooked is that there are probably over 100,000,000 websites on the internet. Imagine if I try to go through my inbox after each one of them has sent me one message. You are entitled to send me zero unsolicited commercial messages.
I think Ben has totally failed to communicate this concept. I know that you have to be careful educating potential customers or you scare them away, but I think you should have raised that point after each poster who thinks they are entitled to send me unsolicited commercial email.
waaaaahhhh. I bet you just freak out when you get a piece of “junk” mail in your mailbox.
Get a grip and stop over generalizing… every website in the world is not going to send you an email.
“Get a grip and stop over generalizing… every website in the world is not going to send you an email.”
Actually, I once published an academic paper in a biology-related journal that included my email address on the paper… and now every biology-related journal, conference, news service in the world sends me a mail.
I’d guess nearly a thousand distinct senders over the years.
I read http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business – which is linked to in the MailChimp Terms of Use (actual link from TofU is http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm)
Surprisingly, I didn’t see anything about “you need a relationship or some sort of opt-in to email someone” at the CAN-SPAM page. I only saw that there needs to be an opt-out option and that you need to honor the opt-out within 10 business days.
Also, I read that you need to identify your message as an advertisement “clearly and conspicuously”. Since it “covers all commercial messages”, I’d expect MailChimp should automatically put this in the emails they send out.
The CAN-SPAM rules state that only 3 types of email message content exist:
1) commercial content –> advertises or promotes a commercial product or service
2) transactional or relationship content –> facilitates or updates a customer about an agreed or ongoing transaction
3) other content –> neither commercial nor transactional/relationship
If I’m correctly understanding the CAN-SPAM rules and the MailChimp Terms of Use, it almost seems like MailChimp would be best suited for personal use only or maybe a soft-sell business use because:
1) MailChimp doesn’t automatically add “this is an advertisement” — MailChimp is good at what they do and more knowledgable about CAN-SPAM than me so surely they would’ve added a checkbox to add the required text to the body of the email *IF* they allowed these types of messages, which I get the impression they don’t.
2) What content would be so important to share it with more than 20 people (something any personal mail system can easily do) that didn’t include some sort of advertisment/promotional purpose? When you’re a business with a newsletter with tips, how-to’s, recipes, or other helpful things, nothing’s ever truly *free*… You have a link to the products you sell or the services you offer or something else. Or the “how-to” article features your product, like “How-To: Bake A Cake”, which features your Yeast-O-Matic product.
3) Email of the transactional nature would be done for you by your eCart suite or whatever, not by MailChimp. In other words, one-to-one emails, which MailChimp states their service isn’t for.
4) So what’s left? Relational and Other email message content, whatever that is… If it’s follow-up from a trade show, MailChimp says to use your CRM.
Please let me know if I:
A) Understand perfectly
B) Need some direction/examples
C) Am off my rocker
I like rules and laws that help. I like to be in compliance (hence, I read the compliance guide and the terms). I want to sell valuable products. Please help.
Thanks!
You can sell all you want with MailChimp — but only to people who specifically requested it from you. Getting this initial permission is the challenging part that a lot of people find difficult.
Many times at our business, our initial touch point with clients is over the phone. If a prospective or new client provides an email address during a conversation and verbally agrees to being contacted via email, would sending one follow-up email (nightly to each email address received) be considered spam?
Hi Sarah,
While on the phone, if they agree to receive email marketing, you could just pull up your own signup form, and plug in their email address. Tell them they’ll get a confirmation email in a few moments that they can click. I’ve gotten used to doing this (check email after a phone call) all the time with my bank and insurance companies. The confirmation-link email that we send can even be modified a little, in case it helps you make a more personal connection during that initial touch point.
Hi Ben,
Maybe a bit off topic, but please can you help me?
For my company I have send newsletters in the past. About 2/3 years ago.
Now our website is completely redesigned & updated and I’m using Mailchimp for the first time, but we still have a database of newsletter subscribers form back then.
Any idea how Mailchimp handles email addresses that don’t exist anymore? Will they be removed automaticly from the database?
Thank you.
Hi Ben,
Sadly, we are seeing evidence of the power of one person’s complaints to shut down someone’s service. As loyal customers, with no complaints for 2 years, our account has been suspended for a single complaint. It was the result of an email address book dump (by the boss) adding a person who had previously unsubscribed – they have several email addresses. Now we are being asked to send an email to each of our subscibers and have all 2500 or so list members manually resubscribe.
1 complaint.
So I guess the moral of the story is: don’t import your contacts list!
Ben – Very well said across the board. Seems as though some are taking their frustrations out on you and that is unfortunate, but I definitely understand where yourself and Mail Chimp are coming from on this one. Also unfortunate is that I stumbled upon Mail Chimp in searching for an alternative to ExactTarget and due to the nature of our business (marketing firm for the career college and higher education industry), will not be able to use your service at this time. However, I appreciate your insights on how we may be able to take a more traditional mass marketing campaign and tailor it to work within Mail Chimp. There is a large chunk of subscribers to our current email sends for clients that are very interested but since we cannot necessarily monitor the avenues in which our clients build their lists, we see high bounce rates, unsubscribes, etc. We are very CAN-SPAM compliant and place a large emphasis on this, but clearly that is not the only issue at hand here. Long story short, we do drive our audience to inquiry forms, therefore with a little bit of additional clarifying text and opt-ins, we could certainly build lists within ExactTarget that would ultimately work with Mail Chimp. We’re working on implementing this process as I write this and I am very excited about the additional value added services that Mail Chimp will be able to provide our clients in the right cases.
Interesting discussion. We run an annual race and have the email addresses for runners of the race going back to 2008.
We have maintained the list over time with opt-out options in every email. Our last message to the entire list of over 4,000 runners was a few months ago. We made sure we cleaned all of the bounces and undeliverable messages. We have race registration (or website signup) confirmations for every single email on our list and can document it.
Given all of that information, are you still saying that one spam complaint from a single person out of 4,000 will cause you to suspend our account? If that’s the case I think it is overkill. We are happy to unsubscribe anyone from the list at any time and have been consistent with offering this in every email sent for the last 4 years. What is MailChimp’s take on our situation?
Thanks,
Rob
Why should mailchip block their customers (us) if we end up with that one email marked as spam? Shouldn’t they treat the email marked as spam as some sort of PERMANENT unsubscribe, not allowing us to email them anymore? I don’t want to email consumers that mark me as spam any more than the next guy, and I don’t want to be called a spammer and blacklisted. Why do we need to be blocked for one or two addresses?
Blocking happens when you exceed a % threshold. The threshold is set by ISPs, not by us. We have to adhere by their rules if we don’t want our entire system blocked. Most cases, we send warnings to users about issues, and unfortunately many users perceive these warnings as accusations. They are merely a “heads-up!” that if trends continue, a suspension could occur. Even then, suspensions are not the same as shutdowns.
hi,
i had dumped my outlook address book that i was careful tht it only contained client contact details and once i tried to send the email i received a message from mail chimp saying it had been blocked beacuse of violation of terms of use.
can you help?
Hi Ben,
I read the post, comments, terms and conditions and CAN-SPAM Act, but everywhere it’s saying only about personal emails.
What happens when it comes to business emails, which are public. The companies are putting them on the website to be contacted. Besides, when you start to open a business that provides services to other companies, the main point is to connect and make contact with as many companies and to present your offer.
Let’s say that you can provide some services to multiple types of companies and want to send an email to introduce yourself, explain to them what you do and what you can provide to the business they already have:
1. You want to contact the first time a list of companies in a certain region.
2. You search for companies in that region who use or would be interested in your services and create a personalized offer for them.
3. Manually take their email address from their website or other sources that have been left for contact purposes(like print advertising, etc.)..
4. Create a campaign and send your offer with specification that they are not in a database for bulk mail, giving them the opportunity to make contact, the subscribe option to receive any future emails and eventually the unsubscribe option (this just to meet the terms and conditions, because if they do not contact you, they will not be contacted again because they are not interested in your offers).
This method is considered as spam or not, given that these emails were created to be contacted and you do not try to provide services unrelated to their field (eg. Offer manicure to Internet Service Providers :)?
If so, please tell me why.
I hope to hear your answer as soon as possible.
Thanks a lot,
Ovidiu
Everything was fine until #4, “create a campaign.”
Send to those people manually, from your own email program and servers, one recipient at a time. Then, you’re not spamming, and you’re not violating any ESP or ISP rules, and more importantly, you’re more likely to look human and get an actual response.
My husband made a mistake and sent out an email on his hotmail account including many addresses.
The account has been suspended and he has answered a whole battery of questions for Microsoft in order to have it restored. They say it will take about 24 hours.
Can anyone tell us just how many addresses one can include in one email in order to be safe from this?
Thank you!
Ida Warren
I am doing some recruiting for my business. One source of candidates is from resumes posted on line. How can I legitimately use email to send them an offer to look at my job offering. I do not have an opt in relationship. Please advise
Just email them personally. Not en masse. Use your desktop email program to send them messages. Not MailChimp. Spam is unsolicited, mass email. Emailing one person an unsolicited offer is not spam. Emailing a group of people an unsolicited offer is spam. And I wouldn’t use MailChimp to send a one-to-one email, either (some people think it’d be neat to track opens, clicks, etc). That’s just not personal enough.
My boss handed me a plastic bag full of business cards and asked that I set up a mailing list for a newsletter for his clients. I just started so I don’t know the age of these contacts. Any helpful instructions as to not be labeled as SPAM? Should I send out personal invitation emails to join? I don’t want to get this newsletter started on the wrong foot.
Yep, personal invitations to join are the way to go. If your boss gives any pushback, there’s always this: http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/spam-lawsuits/
Hi Ben, we have a question. We are nearly done developing a new business and we have isolated our target market on a global scale. Now i know this is usually considered “black-hat” but we have setup a leads builder by way of data mining scripts over the internet. Our intentions are NOT to constantly SPAM recipients but we have no other means to gain leads.
Our intention is to send a SINGLE email to extremely specific businesses with whom we have never had prior contact with. The email will contain an opt-out feature to permanently halt any more mails to that recipient. Our intentions are to simply “Notify” these businesses that our product exists, one time only per email address. How do we go about doing this without looking like spammers and getting blacklisted, or worse, SHUTDOWN by our ISP?
We have expressed our intentions to our ISP and their policies indicate that they will need to shut us down if they recieve numerous complaints. We are estimating our database at approximately 50k-100k email addresses.
Sending an unsolicited commercial email to a bulk list is the very definition of spam. Not saying you’re a spammer. But doing that will get you labeled as a spammer, because it’s spam. You’ll be shut down by your ISP and your ESP. I’ve been in your shoes. When MailChimp was new and had ZERO customers, I sent postcards via snail mail. It was frustrating. I sent 500, and got 3 or 4 customers out of it. One turned out to be a great long term customer. Anyway, you could build up a database and snail-mail those prospects. When you snail mail, it’s *you* that bears 100% of the cost of marketing. When you send email, the recipient bears some of the cost in both time and money (which is why people get so angry).
Hi there.
We have a mailing list that has in excess of 4,000 people, all of which have subscribed but were mostly imported from an excel spreadsheet.
Most of our campaigns have a 25% open rate, but we have had a few Spam responses coming through.
I’ve been trying to create a separate list for the 75% with low open ratings to try and send them a resubscribe or opt out message, but am not sure the best way to go about it. I don’t want to send to the whole list as I feel I could lose some good subscribers.
Any thoughts would be helpful.
Thanks
Paul
Hi Paul, The following article: http://eepurl.com/hcI1 is specific to removing lower performing segments of your list, but you can apply just the segmenting part of it for your needs. You’ll see how to segment based on member activity rating: http://eepurl.com/hcPr sometimes just known as the star rating, or even based on open activity against recent campaigns. Using these options you’ll be able to identify who you might want to unsubscribe right away and who might get one final email.