Recommend a Friend email, Refer a Friend, Tell a Friend (TAF), Share with a Friend, Forward to a Friend requests, whatever you want to call them, they can negatively impact your email deliverability and online reputation. Generally Tell a Friend links or words encouraging people to Refer a Friend or to share your email with a friend don't really generate much quality traffic, but they sure can bring deliverability trouble. In fact, there are a couple of different ways that exhorting your readers to "tell a friend" can cause you problems.
Address book importing. Odds are good that if you aren't doing it, you are either thinking about doing it, or you know someone who is doing it or thinking about doing it. Because, you see, it's all the rage. It's also an awful practice.
Here's one of those things that impacts email deliverability which can be so subtle, and yet so critical. It can bite you in the back without your realizing it, and then six months later you wonder why you have gangrene in your knees; it can be that difficult to connect the dots. That is until someone points it out to you, and then you have that forehead-slapping moment: of course! And that thing is that setting and meeting subscriber expectations will have a direct and demonstrable impact on your email deliverability (not to mention your email's effectiveness).
We are often asked "Where can I buy email lists?" or "Where are free email lists for marketing?" and the answer is "all sorts of places".
It is never ok to repurpose someone's email address - especially by putting it on a mailing list - without their express permission. Even if it were ok (which it isn't), it will cause the recipient to mark your email as spam, and that in itself, when it happens enough, will cause your email to get blocked.
We were stunned when we came across an article by Internet Evolution, suggesting email marketers use Paypal's batch payment function to send mass emails to non-opted-in recipients, with a payment incentive to open the email. The article even states directly, "The sender can simply upload a list of targeted but unknown email addresses and give each a 1 cent payment."
The first true marketing email did not arrive until 1978, when a company called DEC (which became part of Compaq, now HP) sent an invitation to the product launch of a new machine to all addresses in the ARPANET directory on the USA's West Coast. They were heavily criticized for the act, which broke the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and everyone else was reminded of the rule.
Do you need to get consent from your customers before adding them to your B2C email marketing list? Building your B2C email list with consent is very important to your bottom line. (B2C stands for “business to consumer” or “business to customer”.) There are many examples of when you can do something, but perhaps shouldn’t, and nowhere is this more evident than in what is permitted by the CAN-SPAM Federal email marketing law. For the purposes of this article in particular we are going to be talking about adding a customer’s email address to your marketing mailing list without asking them first, and hopefully convincing you that you should always get consent before adding them to your B2C email list.
We talk a lot about email opt-in here, and you may be wondering "what is a good opt-in definition" or "what is the definition of confirmed opt-in" or even "how does double opt-in work?" (We get all of those questions.) If you are not sure about the exact definition of opt-in when it comes to building email marketing lists or other types of email lists, or the definition of spam, here is a quick review of what each of them mean.
The title of this article, "Not all double- or confirmed opt-in requires a confirmation email" may seen at first like an oxymoron. But it's not.
Listen to Our Blogcast
- Iowa, Montana, Indiana, and Tennessee Join the Ranks of States with Email Opt-in Requirement in New Data Privacy Laws (Season 3 Episode 8)
- New Texas Data Privacy Law is Strict on Email Collection and Email Marketing (Season 3 Episode 7)
- The Value of a Political Email List: Ready for Ron (RFR) versus the FEC (Season 3 Episode 6)
- Who is Behind the Domain Kmail-lists? Here's Who (Season 3, Episode 5)
- Get a Great Return on SMS Marketing While Following SMS Marketing Laws and Best Practices (Season 3 Episode 6)