Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Sometimes People Amaze Me ...

People sign up for your newsletter, then they:

1. Never add your email address to their SPAM filter. So every time you send them an email, you receive a challenge email from Earthlink or AOL or some other SPAM filtering service that asks you to verify your email and type in stupid little numbers and letters that only the blind can read. And your message still remains unread because you have to go through this same process every week.

2. Send you a threatening email complaining that you are spamming them and that they never signed up for your stupid newsletter in the first place and if you don’t stop emailing them they are going to sue you for $1100 for every SPAM email received. Then you send them a copy of their original opt-in request — you do save those, don’t you? — and then they shut up and apologize.And they still don’t read your emails.

3. They never check their ISP email box and let it stay full and over quota all the time. Then the second you remove them, they re-subscribe under a new email address from another free ISP. And the problem goes on and on and on.

God, help us. And we want to use email for marketing? Even if you have a large list, and even if your autoresponder gets more email through than you can on your own, you still face the same problems. There has to be a better way to get your marketing message into the hands of your target audience.

But you can’t call them unless they provided that info when they opted in. And besides they would probably put you on the do not call list anyway.

Pony express anyone?

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