Comments on: Email Marketing Mistake: The Old Address Book Dump

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:55:21 +0000

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.

By: Rick Zeien

Rick Zeien — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:49:19 +0000

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

By: Ida Warren

Ida Warren — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:41:29 +0000

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

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:29:39 +0000

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.

By: Ovidiu

Ovidiu — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 21:14:29 +0000

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

By: markk

markk — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:58:51 +0000

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?

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 11:08:17 +0000

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.

By: Preston

Preston — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:29:47 +0000

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?

By: mike

mike — Sat, 14 May 2011 19:34:46 +0000

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.

By: Rob

Rob — Sat, 14 May 2011 15:38:56 +0000

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