Opt In Direct Email Marketing

Updated: May 3, 2022

Opt In Direct Email Marketing or Bulk Email Spam?

Many people use email marketing to promote their goods and services. Sadly, some do not know the difference between spam and opt in direct email marketing. As the years go by, many sources have blurred the line between opt in and bulk email spam for their own purposes. Let’s start by clearing up some confusion by defining the two.

Bulk email spam: Spam is any email sent for commercial purposes without permission from the recipient. This means that if you are sending emails to your friends, family or co-workers, it does not qualify as spam. However, if you are sending emails offering any sort of offer or ad to people who never asked to receive them from you, then you are most definitely a spammer sending spam.

Opt In Direct Email Marketing: Opt-in email is any commercial email sent to people who have actually requested to receive it. Permission, in this case, is clear-cut. If you have a list based on people who have signed up to receive emails about travel in general but not your specific travel agency, it does not qualify as specific permission. If you have a list of people who have agreed, in some form of writing, link clicking or other evidence, that they want to receive emails from your travel agency, you fall well within the bounds of opt-in.

What makes permission email marketing different is not just that you have the permission from the recipient to send to them. The big key is that you, by getting permission, are sending email campaigns to people who really want to receive them. Still, even with permission based email marketing, every once in awhile a person who gave you permission will hit the spam button. If you ever get called in to question, you have the proof showing your email service provider that you had permission and you followed the proper procedure.

Opt-In Direct Email: Advantages

Preserves your email marketing reputation
Shows customers that you respect their privacy
Helps you email people who are interested in what you are selling
Saves you time and money by micro-focusing your list
Lets you be more targeted in your campaigns
Helps you build long-term, trust-based relationships with customers
Can boost your sales and product interest

Bulk Email Spam: Disadvantages

Sending bulk email spam puts your email marketing reputation at risk. When you send mass emails to people who never asked for them, they are going to complain and hit the spam button. This will get you in trouble with Internet service providers, could get your email and IP address blacklisted, and will definitely cost you sales.

And to make matters worse …

Your recipients will be unresponsive and potentially hostile
You’ll waste valuable time sending to an unresponsive list
You’ll waste your budget sending emails to people who don’t want them
You’ll ruin your email marketing reputation
You’ll ruin the reputation of your company or business
You’ll see your open and click-through rates plummet

On top of all this, even with best email marketing practices in play, email service providers have their own widely varying sets of rules about how they process email. Even the best email marketer can expect as many as 20% of emails to not make it to the inbox.

But if you send out spam, you can reverse that number and expect to see less than 20% actually make it in. That’s being gracious. Of those, many will complain and cause problems for you. If we’re not being clear, we recommend getting permission.

TrafficWave.net makes it easy to get permission. You just add a capture form to your web site. When that form gets filled out, we send out a confirmation email asking them to verify that they want your information. This verifies that they entered the email address correctly and have actually requested your information.

For a list of different ways you can build your lists with opt in direct email marketing, check out the following articles:

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