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Have you ever met “Anonymous Marketers”? If you are a webmaster, or participate in newsgroups or discussion lists, you probably have. Who they are? They are the ones sending you emails beginning with a sentence like, “I got your email address from a list of people who are interested in ……. (business opportunities, health products, etc.), therefore this is not spam.” Or they sometimes say, “You are receiving this email because we belong to the same mailing list. Therefore, this is not spam.”
Sounds familiar?
I know a lot of people are receiving them, even though they should not. The problem is that many so-called “Internet Marketers” collect emails from newsgroups with a software and spam the people on this list. Then they write a nice sentence at the beginning of the message like the one above, thinking that you will think something like, “I guess I forgot I subscribed to this mailing list”. I call these mailings “legal spam”, since they trick people into thinking that they agreed to receive them.
BEWARE: “Anonymous Marketers” also use a nice legal scheme where they write “To be removed from this list, hit the REPLY button and write REMOVE in the subject line” and then they add something like, “According the bill 1234567890, since a way to be removed from the list is included in this message, this is not spam.”
The fact is: it does not matter whether or not it is legal, it is still very annoying, because they were unsolicited emails. And sometimes when you reply with REMOVE in the subject line, you receive a nice email from you ISP, saying that the message could not be delivered because the email address does not exist.
Of course, it only takes a few seconds to start reading these emails and delete them. However, if we want to have an internet that is a nice place to be. These tactics (and the people using them) must be stop. This is why we must try to stop these postings: to build a “high-quality internet.”
Some “anonymous marketers” will say that these emails are free and that people receiving them should not complain. I have only one thing to say about this, “I hate receiving unsolicited emails and I hate it even more when there is no way to be removed from the mailing list.”
The bottom line is:
1) IF YOU RECEIVE THIS KIND OF EMAILS, be careful because it is probably someone who “stole” your email address from a newsgroup, your website, etc and who is trying to “get rich quick”. What they are advertising may be a very good product or affiliate program, but there are legitimate ways to advertise such as press releases, ffa pages, the classifieds, e-zine advertisements, etc.
2) IF YOU ARE AN INTERNET MARKETER and that you actually built your mailing list or bought it from a website, PLEASE include the COMPLETE source of your list with a simple sentence like, “You are receiving this message because your email address is in my mailing list, which you joined at my website, located at http://www.yourwebsite.com.” or “ You are receiving this message because your email address is in my mailing list, which I purchased at http://www.websiteaddress.com”. This way, if people forgot that they joined your mailing list or that they agreed to receive emails from strangers by joining several mailing lists at a specialized website, they will be able to visit these websites and remember that they subscribed.
3) IF YOU USE “LEGAL SPAM”, now you are warned, “We will not tolerate this situation any more, stop using this marketing tactic.” If you really have a good product, a press release is still the best way to get your product known. Ever received an unsolicited email from IBM or Microsoft? Of course not, because they use the media to receive publicity, and they are the ones earning a lot of money, not the ones using spam.
So, don’t forget that a simple, yet complete sentence like the ones above, since it clearly mentions where the marketer got his list, will help you create and keep a relationship based on trust with your members. This way, we will be able to know who are the “good” marketers and the “should-think-about-another-way-to-earn-money” marketers.
