The Email Wars

I was doing some searching around the web the past few days to see what types of tips are out on the web to help email marketers getting started with email marketing. I was a little stunned when I found Microsoft in the results with a tips page for small business about email marketing.

http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/tips/email-marketing-tips.mspx

These were the ones that caught my eye in a bad way. Why would they be telling people to send out MASS MAILINGS and my favorite (from the guys taking people to court and throwing them in jail) was the one about how “violations probably won’t put you in jail”.

Send out a mass mailing using List Builder with Business Contact Manager?
See how to import List Builder records into Business Contact Manager, or export Business Contact Manager records into List Builder.

How to stay out of trouble with the CAN-SPAM Act
The CAN-SPAM Act imposes some requirements on mass emailers. Violations probably won’t put you in jail. But if your recipients complain, you could be in for a hassle.

Come on guys, you really need to clean these tips up a bit. They are not very best practice to be telling people how to send out mass emails as easy as this and let them know that there really aren’t any serious reprocussions. Practice what you preach and help us all put an end to mass emails and scare the beejesus out of anyone not toeing the lines of the law.

I took a plunge the other week and downloaded Plaxo. Not sure why, but I will place some blame on David Baker over at Avenue A/Razorfish as he sent me a Plaxo update card. I have never been a fan of this system and I cannot truthfully tell you why. Now that I have it installed on one of my computers, I don’t really use it as often as I thought I might. It seems like a good tool, but I guess I need to commit to it.

What I did like was the sign up process and they great screen showing me exactly what the email was going to look like when I got it in my inbox. It was a copy of the confirmation email and I thought this was a really nice touch on closing the loop with the opt in process. Many opt ins tell you to expect or look for an email. None that I have seen before this one actually give you a visual of what you will see in the inbox. So kudos to Plaxo for this nice, high-impact touch.

It made me think about our own opt in process and some best practices. I had been talking to an agency partner the other day about best practices in email marketing when it came to surveys. The idea of sending out a pre-survey email to let them know to expect a survey was the concept to see if testing conditioning behavoir would increase the amount of survey responses. The premise of letting someone know what to expect and what was expected of them was something we thought we should try. I will let you know if it increased the survey participation after it is all done.