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Tag Archives: spam

The guest post trap (which can destroy your web site)

If you have a blog, someone (usually claiming to be a freelance writer) has approached you to write guests posts for your blog. They claim they just want to help you with free content or they want help promoting their career. Warning: It’s a trap, and you’re going to get screwed. How? Because most of […]

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This is the Police! STEP AWAY FROM THE SEND BUTTON!

Over-emailing your customer list is always, always bad marketing. There is absolutely no reason to think your customers want to get a special offer every day. When you over-mail, you just turn happy customers who would be happy to hear from you occasionally into annoyed ex-customers. So why do marketers do it? Because of a fundamental […]

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Nope. You don’t get to do this.

The CAN-SPAM law says your have 10 days to remove someone from an email list. The DON’T-PISS-OFF-YOUR-CUSTOMERS law says that’s nonsense and rude. Whoever permitted this screen to be written needs to focus on customer happiness before legal compliance:

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Spam vs. Viral

Seth Godin is a man who defined honest and effective email for all of us. Permission Marketing and Unleashing the Ideavirus are required reading for our team. Here’s a healthy reminder of the biggest ideas in email from two of Seth’s recent blog posts: Is this spam? If you have to ask, it probably is. The […]

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Would you walk into a sales meeting and poop on the floor?

Probably not. (Not a great first impression.) So why do so many marketers think that it’s OK to add prospects to an email blast list? Here’s the message you send when you do that: “I’m a selfish, lazy marketer who would rather spam prospects than do the work to make a proper, personal sales call.” […]

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Don’t let your company embarrass you

For some inconceivably stupid reason, my pharmacy (a national chain) is telemarketing current customers with an auto-dialer with a message about “getting ready for allergy season.” It’s an amazingly efficient way to turn happy customers into angry enemies. They’ve called me four times, and four times I called my store to get off the list. […]

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Should we forgive the sleazy behavior once companies get famous?

Many famous dot-coms did a lot of sleazy, spammy things in their early days. AOL, Microsoft, and other major players in the online advertising industry bought and absorbed some very ugly promoters of pop-ups, spam, and deceptive ad practices. Today, startup Thumbtack is shamelessly harvesting emails off of Craigslist and mass-spamming  fake personal emails to […]

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A quick way to increase email response rates

Have you cleaned your email list? If you’re not regularly cleaning bad email addresses out of your email list, you’re really hurting your email effectiveness: Large numbers of bouncing emails trigger spam filters at ISPs. Much less of your good email gets through. Your data is way off. Your open and click rates are skewed […]

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Email standards are slipping

eBay suddenly started sending a “Daily Deals” email to all their customers. I’m sure their lawyers found some loophole in the terms of service that says they can email you whenever they want. But it’s unasked for, and unwanted, and that’s spam. I don’t want an email from them every day. They know that I […]

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