Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Well they are clients so you should be ok. Just make sure you give them an opt out or opt in with confirmation.

Michael

Stephanie

I am not fully conversant with Australian Spam laws but the data will be old and you should validate it before sending an email out to it.

If you use a comprehensive email management system it should be able to remove invalid data.

Statistically 20% of data becomes obsolete every year with people moving or changing their service provider. Expect a fairly high level of loss.

Hope this helps

Nigel T Packer

They may have double opt'd in when they signed up for the list.

Don't call attention to the negative. Some of the addys will bounce back, others will opt out. Just go for it. Or you are right, you'll severely cut the list.

Hello Stephanie

The Australian Communications and Media Authority hosts information about the Spam Act:

This page explains how to avoid being a spammer:
https://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310299

This page explains inferred and express consent: https://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310572

This page explains how consent is mandatory: https://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310323

And here's the Code of Practice developed in conjunction between the Commonwealth Government and the Internet Industry Association. worth reading to ensure you follow.

If you don't think you may have either express or inferred consent from members of your list, you would be best advised to not e-mail them.

If you do e-mail them to ask them to opt-in, you might do it by explaining you have been mailing them, and you're writing to check they still want to receive your e-mail. You might also give them the option to update their details. That's not quite double opt-in, but close. BTW, double opt-in isn't a requirement, but acceptable consent is.

You should always provide a way to unsubscribe - unless the nature of your relationship with recipients demands that you have to be able to communicate with them when you need to. It doesn't sound like that is the situation.

I know you don't want your list to shrink, but you're better off biting the bullet and culling all unwilling participants, and those whose address is no longer valid, than you are kidding yourself your marketing efforts to an unhygienic list are ever going to get you a return on investment. Clean house properly before you try to move forward.

If you need a local view on what you're doing, feel free to contact me via my profile - just click the link on my name above. I'm in Melbourne, but the rules are made federally so equally applicable in all states and territories.

Hope that helps.

Chris Blackman

Dear Stephanie,

Regardless of any country’s spam laws, it’s good business practice to have every person signing up for an e-mail newsletter do so through a double opt in.

This process engages and connects the prospect and it offers a modest guarantee that your message arrives in your prospect’s in box as some kind of welcome guest, rather than being seen as irritant.

OK. So you, Stephanie, inherited this list when you joined this company.

I want to make this clear because what follows isn’t about you personally. With me? Good. Off we go.

You don’t say how big your company list is, what niche your company serves, or what your company’s e-mails are designed to do (raise awareness, reinforce a previous message or purchase, give news, promote an offer, etc.,).

But your company (and your boss) seem to be missing the point of two concepts: the purpose of a newsletter; and once a company has compiled a list, the importance of using that list.

Newsletters are intended to give NEWS. The word “News” implies that connected content is NEW, otherwise it becomes “Olds”.

Unless one’s company is selling antiques, fossils, or vintage wine, most things that are considered “old” in marketing are generally not seen as helpful, relevant, or significant to the target audience. In fact, anything old arriving in an e-mail in box, particularly if it’s a message from a company that the prospect or customer signed up with and last heard from 14 months ago, is likely to bounce sky high or it’ll get deleted.

It’s not your company’s list that’s stale, it’s your company’s approach to delivering its message to its audience that’s stale.

Before your company sends anything anywhere, your bosses have got to ask themselves just what they want this newsletter to achieve. Because at the moment, for their list to suddenly receive a newsletter out of the blue, after 14 months of no other communication (based on the information you’ve given above), the only thing the vast majority of those people receiving your message are going to say is “So what? Where’ve you been for the last 14 months?”

This means your message will fail because it lacks significance. To create significance you must give reasons to engage, and to have reasons to engage you must have an interest on the part of the recipient in what it is you’re offering.

But beware.

Any lapse in providing this interest, any halt in stoking this fire leads to prospect or customer ambivalence.

Or apathy. Or, even worse, to out and out contempt. In marketing, one must avoid customer contempt as one would avoid a 20 ft. crocodile when you’re paddling a 12 ft row boat!

Unless its content, offer, relevance, or salience KNOCK PEOPLE’S SOCKS OFF, any message you send out to your current list will probably fall flat, double opt in or not. Why? Because for 14 months your list has heard nothing from you. By all means send your newsletter out to your current list, but make your message matter, and make it flow—meaning, make your total message campaign flow from one message to another.

This means sending not just one message, but a whole slew of them, evenly spaced, but each one reinforcing the point of its predecessor or introducing the point of its successor.

Make those messages about the recipient and the recipient’s needs, problems, and pain points, make sure you tell your list that your company dropped the ball, but that now, Sheriff Stephanie is here to keep things in order.

You’ve got to make your list like you, fall in love with you, and want to buy from you and this is going to take work. You've also got to give them the ability to unsubscribe from your list and, if they choose to, sign up again BECAUSE THEY WANT TO!

If you (or your boss) don’t like the sound of this, your only other option is to build (or buy/rent) a new list that’s tightly focused on the needs of the prospects in your niche; a list that offers specific solutions and salves to whatever irks or pains the people on it.

But at a MINIMUM, your list (any list) ought to be hearing from you MONTHLY (by e-mail and (or) by regular mail), or, as is often the case with many online businesses, your list ought to be hearing from you WEEKLY, as is the case with the people that receive my modest newsletter. This keeps people engaged because the content they’re receiving is significant to their needs. All anyone has to do to receive their newsletter from me is sign up via my blog (via my profile at the top of this entry). I don’t sell anything to the people my list, but the point is, they hear from me ONCE EVERY WEEK. Regular as clockwork.

Who knows? Perhaps this approach won’t work for your company. But again, there’s nothing wrong with your list or the people on it. They are not stale. They’ve been there all along. But what’s missing from their lives is your message. When people sign up for something they expect to receive whatever it is they signed up for. When they don’t receive whatever it is they were expecting, their attention to future messages tends to stray. When this happens, they begin to look elsewhere for fulfillment. And when they find what they’re looking for somewhere else, they pay more attention to the new stimulus than to the old, and wherever their attention goes from you, their money will go with them.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Use the list as is.

Ensure that you allow an opt-out. Go the extra step and include the opt-out link at the top.

Be prepared for a whole lot of hard bounces.

Prune the list of the hard bounces.

Report back and let us know what percentage of your list was stale (please).

Good luck!

Paul