At the last Chapter meeting we talked about ways to followup with leads and clients, email being one of them. This is a post about the wrong wrong wrong way to do email marketing.

Recently, I’ve been getting SPAM email from some hypnotist in Texas whom I’ve never heard of, offering to sell me her wonderful practice building program that she’s developed. A few of the problems with this stupid email:

1. She publicly cc:d everyone on her list, clueless about business etiquette. It may be fine to do that with people with whom you have a pre-existing connection of some sort, but awfully lame when sending an unsolicited commercial sales pitch to a stranger.

2. Her email included a Word document attachment — a great way to spread viruses

3. She used her personal Juno.com address to send this email (hmm, should I take business advice from someone who will not spend $9 for their own domain?)

4. She violated federal law (the CAN-SPAM Act) by not being in compliance with certain things that are required as part of commercial email solicitations:

5. The email provides no automated way to unsubscribe

6. The email lacks business contact information such as a physical address

7. She obviously went around to different hypnosis sites harvesting people’s email addresses, completely ignoring “opt-in” and permission marketing.

All these things just scream “Amateur!”

Doing this sort of thing makes it likely that the sender’s email account will be blacklisted as a SPAM originator. Too bad for her. But worse, it makes it likely that any relevant hypnosis-related emails from other practitioners will be automatically filtered into the same junk categories as emails about “FREE VIAGRA” and “NO MONEY DOWN TIMESHARES”.

I still got junk email from her even after requesting removal from her lists. So I forwarded a complaint to her internet service provider and the Federal Trade Commission, since she continued to ignore the CAN-SPAM Act.

To learn more about the CAN-SPAM Act, take a look at: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm

Take note of this section:

Penalties: Each violation of the above provisions is subject to fines of up to $11,000.

Regardless of the legal compliance issues, it’s just displays a lack of professionalism and consideration to ignore these simple rules, just because “I believe in this program I’m offering to fellow hypnotists” — which is what this practitioner used as a justification after I asked her to stop sending me this junk.

Don’t do what this practitioner is doing. Spend a few bucks on a hosted email service like AWeber. Just Google “email autoresponder” and look it up. These things generally cost less than $20/month. Seriously, if you cannot get a positive return on a small investment like that, then you may need to reevaluate what you’re doing.

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