Should I spam my customers?

July 4, 2003

Editor’s note: Russ McGuire is the online director of Business Reform Magazine. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.

War has been declared on spam. You’ve heard from all corners, including this one, of the evils of this pervasive menace to society. As a businessperson seeking to act ethically (and perhaps more importantly, seeking to appear ethical), probably the farthest thing from your mind is to launch a mass e-mail marketing campaign for your business. Well guess what?it could be the smartest move you make this year!

Spam is the name commonly given to unsolicited commercial e-mail. People hate it because it’s unsolicited, it’s commercial, and they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume?so they can’t just ignore it. Spammers love spam because it is fast, easy, and cheap. (That’s why there’s so much of it.)

Business Reform launched an e-mail newsletter early this year. It’s been a huge success. Sales through our website have gone through the roof and readership of the content on our site is increasing more than 20% per week.

People hate spam, but they love good content – especially if it’s free and they’ve asked for it. People delete 99.99% of the spam they receive without even reading it. People read about 20%-50% of the e-mail newsletters they receive. And they forward the best ones to their friends?people who have never heard of you or your business! That’s what Internet marketers call the “viral effect” of a highly successful e-mail marketing campaign.

To be sure, we get a few e-mails each week from folks on our list that are mad because they perceive what we’ve sent them to be spam. They don’t remember signing up for our newsletter and they apparently don’t appreciate the content. That’s fine. We strive to handle these requests as quickly as possible and with full respect for each person’s desire to protect their e-mailbox from junk messages.

Here are the top reasons why an e-mail newsletter could be a great move for your company:

E-mail is fast, cheap, and (relatively) easy?both for you and your readers.
E-mail newsletters create an ongoing channel to strengthen your customer relationships.
Good e-mail newsletters are viral?people “catch” the bug and pass it on.
E-mail newsletters create a frequent platform for emphasizing and proving your value proposition.
A good and consistent e-mail newsletter can give your company a tangible “character” and “human-ness” to which your customers can relate.
A well-executed e-mail program can improve customer loyalty and the strength of your brand.
If you sell products through the web, e-mail newsletters can spark impulse purchases.
If you have forms on the web, e-mail newsletters can immediately generate business leads.

However, a poorly executed e-mail newsletter program can be a disaster, if:

You send it to lots of people who perceive they haven’t asked for it and therefore label you as a spammer (i.e. it is unsolicited.)
Your “newsletter” contains no valuable content?only sales pitches (i.e. it is too commercial.)
You become a nuisance, sending your newsletter out more frequently than people want to read it.
You fail to provide working mechanisms for people to unsubscribe from your newsletter.
Your newsletter contradicts your brand positioning, your value proposition, or presents your company in a negative light.
Your content isn’t worth reading and people just delete each issue without reading it.
Your investment is wasted because you don’t have enough people subscribed to the newsletter.

Bottom line, if you take the right steps, an e-mail newsletter could be a great move for your company. However, if you enter into an e-mail campaign haphazardly, without taking the proper precautions, then you could be heading for disaster.

What are the steps required for success?

First, carefully evaluate whether or not you are able to produce a quality product that people will be willing to read. How often can you reasonably produce new issues? Are you willing to commit the resources to consistently meet that schedule?
Second, establish your list. This can be the most time consuming process, so don’t wait too long, but don’t start before you’re committed to following through. Optimally, you should get a “double opt-in” subscription to your list?this means that each person on your list would tell you twice that they really want to receive your newsletter. This is the standard to which anti-spam advocates are seeking to hold commercial e-mail distributions. However, to get your newsletter started, you can probably send the first issue to the folks with whom you already do business and give them an easy way to opt-out.
Opting-out is the third, and perhaps most critical component. Nothing frustrates folks more than when they try to get off of an e-mail list and can’t. Nothing will damage your brand and relationship more than locking people into getting what they perceive to be spam.
Finally, and this is the hardest, you need to consistently create a quality product. It has to balance good looks with fast e-mail downloads and it has to be something worth reading. If you do it right, people will “catch” it and “sneeze”?pass it on to all of their friends?and that only happens with the very best products.

Creating a great e-mail newsletter is hard. One resource I’ve found extremely useful is Debbie Weil’s WordBiz Report. Hers is a great website for e-mail newsletter producers and, of course, she sends out a wonderful newsletter that I read top-to-bottom as soon as it arrives!

So, if you’ve been looking for that exciting new, inexpensive program that will jump-start your online business growth?get cracking on your e-mail distributions. But make sure you don’t take shortcuts and skip critical precautionary steps?you don’t want to be labeled a spammer!

Russ McGuire is Online Director for Business Reform. Prior to joining Business
Reform, Mr. McGuire spent over twenty years in technology industries, performing various roles from writing mission critical software for the nuclear power and defense industries to developing core business strategies in the telecom industry. Mr. McGuire is currently focused on helping businesspeople apply God’s eternal truths to their real-world business challenges through Business Reform’s online services. He can be reached at [email protected].