Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Hi Jcrooks,

You will no doubt get many replies here all interpreting your situation and CAN-SPAM differently.

I could do the same, but my gut is telling me that the right thing for you to do is to contact an attorney comfortable with representing you and your CAN-SPAM issues.

Only then will you have the confidence of your president, and if I was you, only then would I have confidence in my job security.

You have too many questions and issues and past horror stories to be trusting anything but experienced legal advice.

I hope that helps.

With the amount of e-mail marketing our customers do, we probably get .001% "complaints". Spam e-mail has almost gotten to the point that junk mail did...people just delete it.

The real issues are adult related e-mails. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be CAN-SPAM compliant. It DOES mean you shouldn't run scared from an effective marketing method.

I often talk to our customers comparing this to cold-calling. Some companies post "no soliciting" signs and then complain their sales people aren't out cold calling enough.

Michael

I think you might want to reconsider the priorities and trade-offs before you fall on your sword over the email issue. Sure, email can be an effective medium for communicating a marketing message, but given your history and the president's bias, there may be other approaches that are not quite so loaded.

If you're determined to continue to fight this battle, you might try pitching him on letting you try a limited experiment in which you send email to, say, 5% of your list. Then, a few weeks later, do some research among the recipients asking if they valued the email contact, how they would like to be contacted in the future, etc. If that comes back positive, then you can expand with more confidence. If it doesn't, you've limited your black eye to a small number of potential customers.

Another approach would be creating something that your target audience would see as having high value -- a newsletter, a book, a subscription to an industry magazine, etc. Then you can make the offer via email and see how many claim their free offer. In that same email message you can give recipients an opt-in oportunity. Surely that would be about as conservative an approach as you could take, and it might fly.

Good luck. Hope you're successful. Let us know!

I think Pepper Blue gave some good advice. It's really nice that you went to a forum on CAN-Spam, and it is wonderful that you personally believe you clearly understand all the issues, but if I were the President of a 50 person company, I would seek legal advice from a lawyer, not from you or me.

If I were in your situation, I would write a draft "email marketing" plan including many aspects of email marketing (e.g. include following up enquiries... be sure you have effective tools for your affiliates and inside sales team), I would speak with an attorney (not only to discuss the legal implications of CONDUCTING email campaigns, but also to understand the legal implications, if any, of RESTRICTING free speech by affiliates in the form of email campaigns) and my goal would be a small test program with a limited number of affiliates - possibly beginning with an affiliate with their own in-house list.

Hi

Going head to head with a company president, even with a well argued case is one of the best ways to ensure that you find a new job.

The previous advice on tactics and slowly developing a case to use emails is very good – you can, over a period of time develop a model which demonstrates legal compliance, acceptability to your marketplace and a return on your investment in the form of enquiries and orders. The ideas of subscribing existing and prospective customers to an email newsletter which carries considerable value in its content is an excellent one – as are the unsubscribe and opt-in features.

The mechanics of doing this have not been addressed, so here are a few points which might be of use.

If you organise your email campaign on an ad-hoc basis from Outlook or from a home grown database, you are going to make serious mistakes.

Use a CRM system which will allow you to assemble your email list along with all the other customer and prospect demographics you will need to accumulate. We use and sell Maximizer Enterprise, so I’ll stick to that one for the example as I know it best, but other systems offer similar features.

Ensure that there is a “Do not solicit by” field which can contain the ways in which you must not communicate with a contact. The values in this field will be:

Email
Fax
Telesales Call
Mail Shot

In Maximizer, this field is overriding when Its Marketing Campaign Manager sends out a group email. If the box says “Do not solicit by email”, Maximizer won’t send the email.

Organise the email newsletter from the CRM system so that you have all the elements in the same place.

Compose the HTML newsletter or whatever from within the CRM system and attach it to a carefully selected list.

Make the email a mail-merge document, so that you can merge in company details like their name, company and address and any other details relevant to the mailing which you keep on your system. “Dear Mr Smith, I’m writing to you as a user of our XYZ product range to inform you of some new developments” is 100% more effective than dear customer. “XYZ” will vary from email to email depending on what they bought and what’s logged on your CRM system, just like Mr Smith will change to Mr Brown for the next email!

Let the CRM system send it so that you have a record of all the recipients, a copy of what was sent and a logical way to note the results – both positive and negative.

When the responses come in they fall into a number of categories. Deal with them accordingly. This can be done manually by having a front desk person attach them to the contacts record and taking the appropriate action or actions. Or you could get smart and use Work-Flow Automation or KnowledgeSync software to automatically update the CRM system depending on the header of the email, key words or other triggers.

The responses and actions could be:

Yes, I’m interested. Sent literature and a letter, set a hot-list task for a salesperson to call and mark the record as a lead.

No I’m not interested, but keep me on your list. Send a letter of thanks and mark down for a call in 6 months.

Take me off your list: Update the “Do Not Solicit By” field with “Email” and reply to the sender with a personal message confirming that you have done so.

And so on.

When populating the CRM system with email addresses, especially if you are buying in a list or employing someone to research the email addresses, auto-fill the fields which will be used to produce the list of email recipients for a given email-shot.

Once you are satisfied with the list, the content of the email and the look and feel of it, send it our via a local SMPT server. Don’t do it via outlook as few administrators enjoy seeing 35,000 emails in their sent box!

When the results come in, respond to them all according to their individual needs.

If you are able to show the president that you can control your email activities to this level, then backed by the arguments and tactics suggested by my fellow MarketingProfs members, your president may well find that he is convinced.

One last point. Don’t forget about the rules of selling, even if you are selling to your president. Ask him what he’s seeking to do via the marketing mix you deploy. Ask him about his reservations on the email issues. Ask him if these strategies and tactics would go some way to alleviate these concerns and ask him if he would be happy to go ahead with a trial, if it were run in accordance with all the other things he’s just said he’s happy with.

If the guy has come from a sales background, he’ll recognise exactly what you’re doing, approaching him in this way, and usually, he’ll appreciate it. Even if he says “No”, your stock will either be intact or will go up.

Good luck and do let us know how you get on.


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions