I don’t normally gripe and moan, and usually I just try to give the facts. BUT, this post is based on the overwhelming increase of being bombarded with e-mails lately! Unfortunately, it’s e-mails that are unsolicited, from people I don’t even know. Or, people who I sent an e-mail to once, and they have decided I should receive an e-mail from them every week about their specials. Not cool!

So, this post is to explain why this is wrong, and what you can do instead.

To market your business in an effective way, best practise is to ask permission to e-mail  someone. Plain and simple. Asking is easy! Now if you meet someone at a networking event, they give you their business card, they are effectively giving you permission to contact them. Contacting them is one thing, but if you want to sign them up for your newsletter, give them the option to opt out. Don’t take it personally if they do, they might just not be interested at the moment, or like me and so many others, they might have subscribed to a million other newsletters!

Don’t just use Outlook or your e-mail client to e-mail. There are limitations set by many companies that if you e-mail to many people at one time it’s considered spam, therefore potentially not making it to all (or any) of your intended recipients. If you MUST e-mail this way, be sure to read one of my older posts The Power of BCC! It’s there for a reason, so use it. Another reason not to use your e-mail client (Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail) is that it just doesn’t look that good! There are only so many things you can do, and mostly you are looking at plain boring raw text e-mails. Not really exciting and enticing for people to read through.

Consider using a service like Constant Contact or Aweber. I did another post to find out if Constant Contact is worth it. I have never used Aweber but have heard great things about it so be sure to check out both before you decide. You can use templates to create professional HTML e-mails to get your messages across. A big plus with Constant Contact is that people can opt out, and also confirm that they still want to be signed up for your e-mails. They can also forward them on to other people to prompt their friends or contacts to sign up.

Sending people e-mails and NOT giving the option to opt out is rude. It shouldn’t be up to the recipient to just keep deleting them if they don’t want to, and many people don’t want  to appear rude by responding with a request to be removed. Think about your own e-mail techniques and tactics. Are you guilty? It’s ok, we have all committed e-mail sins at one time or another.

Fancy a gripe? What frustrates you? We all get so many e-mails every day, sifting through those unwanted ones is a pain! Share your stories below!

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