The bad news is that if you are an online marketer, the chances that your email campaign will always be unconsciously considered spam are nearly one hundred percent. The good news is that this trend is changing and one of the tools that you must use judiciously is email campaign software. The CAN-SPAM legislation that was passed by the US congress in 2003 actually provides a free hand to most online marketing companies to at least take one shot at sending an unsolicited mail to prospective buyers. However, the other side of this law is that once any of the three main guidelines of the law are broken, you invite legal action. Fundamentally, spam and unsolicited email messages are the same as handing out flyers for a used car sale at a paraplegic convention. You are fundamentally targeting the wrong customer. This means that who you send your message to makes all the difference.

A lot needs to be said about creating working partnerships with relevant institutions that have an existing customer base. These partnerships should be well formulated to ensure that hard sell is not the message that is communicated.

One of the best partnerships in this regard can be found in the banking and insurance industries. In the offline setup, an insurance agent is usually at each bank branch and offers services like financial health checks as a method to sell insurance. These kinds of partnership formats are the type that online marketers need to indulge in to improve the mailing lists of email campaign software.

The general rule is that if you do not get the mail address of a prospect from the prospect itself or from a highly trusted source of the prospect, you are sending spam. One of the biggest dangers for web service providers is unknowingly being party to a spam email campaign. This usually occurs because of a badly thought of partnership in which you offer an unrelated path for spam reaching your trusted customers.

So, imagine that you are an online bookstore and in one of the user registration forms, you ask your customers if they would like to receive sales and promotional offers for software updates, you could be in for trouble. This is because your end customers could end up being spammed for arbitrary software deals. The web service provider and the spammer both lose credibility in this case.

In summation, your email campaign has to follow the content, sending and unsubscribing guidelines of CAN-SPAM, but to ensure that your messages are being sent to the correct prospect, forge sensible, mutually-beneficial partnerships that enable you to connect and acquire a database of customers for your email campaign software.


About the Author

By Jamie Colbs. Jamie is a html email newsletter templates best practices activist advocate for Benchmark Email , a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service.

Author Links Business URL: Html Email Newsletter Templates - Benchmark Email