Email marketing

FRM

Does anyone know what the regulations are with email marketing? I have been told that it is illegal to send bulk emails to possible clients, even if you have been given their contacts by friends.

Is this correct?

anyone have any ideas or thoughts on this?

Culchie

emailing requires an 'customer opt in' since 2004 or so.

Check out the data protection act for the fine details.

keefg

FRM wrote: »

I have been told that it is illegal to send bulk emails to possible clients, even if you have been given their contacts by friends.

Is this correct?

Yep, it's correct and you can get into trouble sending out bulk e-mails.

In my opinion (having found out the hard way) e-mail marketing just doesn't work.

Unless you already have a mailing list of people who have signed up or agree to receive your e-mail then a huge number of them will just be blocked by spam filters and will never be read.

Maybe you could look into the paper leafleting option, but be warned, the return on any mass marketing campaign like this (or e-mail) is about 1 or 2%. So look into your options before investing your time/money.

zAbbo

saying email marketing doesn't work is extremely naive, and is a blanket statement based on your own experience.

When done correctly, email marketing is extremely powerful and can often be a strong driver of repeat customers.

Of course, randomly spamming people with a product or service that would be of no interest to them is never going to work...

keefg

zAbbo wrote: »

saying email marketing doesn't work is extremely naive, and is a blanket statement based on your own experience.

Of course, randomly spamming people with a product or service that would be of no interest to them is never going to work...

My comments are not just based on my own experience but on other business owners as well, I was warned beforehand not to bother with an e-mail campaign but I decided to give it a try for myself.

My e-mails were also sent to business' directly related to my industry, not "random spamming" as you put it, and the return was very poor. I followed up my e-mails with a phone call to dozens of companies on my mailing list and this was how I found out that my e-mail hadn't got through the spam filters.

The OP asked for advice/thoughts about this type of marketing and that's what I gave him. I didn't tell the OP not to do it, but to look into it before investing time & money on any type of campaign.

zAbbo wrote: »

When done correctly, email marketing is extremely powerful and can often be a strong driver of repeat customers

Would you like ellaborate on that? From my own experience and from talking to other business owners, this is only true if you already have built up a mailing list of subscribers to a newsletter or the like. Unless I am mistaken, it would appear that the OP does not have authorised mailing list.

Or is this just a random quote you heard at a marketing seminar somewhere?

zAbbo

Apologies I didn't want to seem condescending .

The reason your emails didn't work, because they didn't get delivered, which is one of the key factors here - have a look at this report here - http://www.mailermailer.com/metrics/ which does benchmarking on delivery/open/read etc.

The success of the campaign, is only going to be as good as the quality of the contacts, and the relativeness of the content to them.

All of this is probably suited to another discussion.

Regarding the legality of mass mailing, it does require opt-in, and generally I'd focus more on the quality of the email contact (their position, and detailed information) rather than quantity.

(btw all this is from experience in working with direct email marketing campaigns over the last 5 years)