Spam Policy

We all hate it. Our email is found by a spammer and we start getting weird and wonderful offers. So how does this happen?

It’s a lot harder to happen now, but it does still happen. People sell or give away lists of their subscribers who then re-target those emails with their product or services. Let me give you an example of how it can happen.

Let’s say you buy a pattern on Craftsy. You have given Craftsy your permission to receive information about that PATTERN only. But the person who put that pattern up for sale also has a copy of your email through their paypal account.

So let’s say they go through their paypal account and copy and paste your email into a spread sheet — this is known as scraping for emails. Or, maybe, but highly improbable, the CEO gives the list to the pattern designer.

Anyway from here your email is imported into an email service provider like Get Response. Now Get Response are a very ethical company. They insist on a double opt in to every list. A double opt in means that you subscribe to a list or newsletter through a webpage, you receive a confirmation email and you click the confirmation link to confirm your subscription. You have opted in twice, double opt in and confirmed that yes you really want to be on the list.

When your email is imported, unless the person who imports the list asks that each email be confirmed, the email can just sit there until something is sent.

So now your list is around 30,000 emails that you have scraped and you try to send them your first email. A company like Get Response will absolutely refuse this as they see it as spam to 30,000 people who have not confirmed they want to hear from you. It doesn’t matter how long you have hosted that list with them, they won’t budge on this. And fair enough. They are protecting your information.

So what do you do?

You can find another provider, or someone who has a longstanding account with another provider who can negotiate on your behalf and get those emails out baby cos that size of a list equals big dollars.

OR

You can do it properly and get everyone to double opt in. Gloriously this will result in an accurate number of people who actually WANT to hear from you. This can see a list go down from 30,000 to about 2,000 or 3,000 and this is where it should be.

Just because someone buys a pattern from you does not necessarily mean that they will want to buy any more of your products or services. They may have hated the pattern and wanted nothing more to do with you.

To presume that people are of course going to love everything you do and want to hear from you about everything is not only a dangerous marketing strategy for you and your business, it’s actually against spam policy of many of the reputable providers, whether or not it’s a widespread written policy anywhere else.

Carry on.