Question: What is not SPAM?

Answer: Generally speaking there is no clear definition of black and white of what can be considered Spam and what is not. However, when you follow a few simple guidelines you will be able to devise a simple, concise non-Spamming policy that will help you develop a long term relationship with your clients.

As you must know, the customer is always right. Gaining a customer is very hard, but loosing one is easy. This is especially true about loyal long-term relationships. When you send emails, always think how would you react after receiving this email. To make it easier for you, here are a few guidelines to follow:

• Allow Unsubscribe. When you send many emails to different people, some of them might want you to stop doing so, for various reasons. For example if you are sending a daily newsletter on some subject, they may no longer be interested in or promoting new products or services that are clearly not for them. In such cases, people should have an easy way to unsubscribe themselves from the list and stop getting the emails. You should always include a disclaimer in the very front of the message, telling the user how to unsubscribe from this mailing list. You might even consider an automatic unsubscribe processing, by setting up a web form or a certain return address for that purpose.
• Identify yourself. Spammers often use unidentifiable return addresses and never put their names in the message. To differentiate yourself from them, identify your message and remind people, that this mail is not sent unsolicited. When they know who it is coming from and they understand they chose to receive it, they will not be annoyed or offended by your messages.
• Don't send large messages. Remember that a vast majority of people do not have a fast internet connection and are still using slow modems to log in to the internet. If they spend considerable amounts of time waiting for your messages, even if they subscribed to the list and consented to receive email from you, they will still be annoyed and will leave your subscriber list. Moreover, not only are you putting pressure on the end user, but also using ISP's precious CPU time and data storage, to process and hold your messages. Thus, the smaller the message, the easier it will be for the user to load it. As a guideline, anything bigger than 100Kb would be considered big for the email message. In case you want to send large messages, consider leaving a link to your web site, where the content may be downloaded instead of attaching it to the e-mail. In the worst case, warn the users they will be receiving large emails from you periodically.
• Talk to the customer, not at the customer. Try to personalize your messages to the customer, collect his/her interests. At the very minimum, you should know the name of the person you are trying to address. E-mails starting with something like: "Dear sir or Madam", or "Hi" are not very good. The more you know about people doing business with you, the more profitable business it will be. You will be able to target your letters more precisely and get more response.
• Don't send confidential information. A regular, unencrypted e-mail message is still considered an unsecured medium of communication. Don't send your customers private information using an e-mail. Things like a credit card number, postal address and so on, should not be mentioned in your e-mail messages.

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