Awhile back FiF Marketing implemented a company-wide spam filter. We have it set so that all the messages the program deems “spam” are put into a separate folder and we review separately. The filter is pretty good, but you there are a few false positives where clients or suppliers we want to hear from get filtered. Last month, the filter caught over 30,000 messages - and we are a relatively small organization. For large companies, the load is huge. If you didn’t know, there was a US law that was supposed to address this issue, called the CAN-SPAM law. The whole purpose was to make sure a company had “permission” to email someone. The whole point was to reduce the amount of unsolicited email that would come to your mailbox. It’s workin’ pretty well, don’cha think?

It’s not that I disagree with the premise. I don’t like junk mail any more than the next person. But there are many messages, newsletters, etc., that I actually like getting. I get good information from our suppliers and I surely want to make sure that inquiries from clients get through. We’ve used emailing services for years. When you have a mailing list of over 3000 people like we do, sending out a newsletter to everyone using Outlook is really, really painful. For a variety of reasons, we just changed over to a new service that was recommended to us, Aweber Communications. One of the things that we really appreciate about this company is that they take permission-based marketing very seriously. In order to switch our list over to them, they wanted us to prove that we had permission. If you got the email from me asking for you to jump through a couple of hoops, this is the reason why. Thanks for subscribing, if you did, and we will try to provide you with information that you will find useful.

So, is email marketing dead? Most of the experts say no. It will change. It has to. What it will look like in the next couple of years, no one really knows. Permission based marketing is one step. If you haven’t implemented this first step, contact us and we can help. If you aren’t asking your clients and prospects for permission to email them, you are absolutely missing out on a powerful way to communicate with your clients.