The old email technology is far from dead and we all depend on an email address for business as well as private purposes.

Looking through my own inbox and counting the number of received spam emails from the last 10+ years clearly, indicate that spam is here to stay. But, don’t attempt to copy-cat. Be aware of best practices and national legislations of the destination country before you hand over your email campaign to a subordinate without knowledge about the rules. Wrong decisions can be very expensive (directly/indirectly).

It can be tempting for a start-up in a country without national legislation on email spam to ship 10.000 emails if just one email opens the sales funnel. It is definitely a shortsighted strategy with a flipside. If the price is 9.999 irritated prospects (in the best case) that will blacklist your business forever, your Brand is in the “Viagra” category in just a few seconds.

 

  • Only use verified email lists
  • Ensure that your list contain sufficient data to make personalized emails
  • Ensure that your list contain destination country information
  • Ensure that your email contain an unsubscribe option
  • Ensure that your campaign/newsletter has a double opt-in process
  • Ensure that there is a good ratio between send emails and actual results by spending time crafting quality content
  • Evaluate your metrics

Many people think that it require more than one mail to get a penalty, but most legislations only take the number of emails into account when the fee is being calculated.

To outsource a campaign/newsletter or using services like Mailchimp is a very good option that many businesses make use of, but remember that it is not possible to outsource the responsibility of above issues.

You can find all legislations by country via this Wikipedia link.

A good intro to all the exciting technical stuff via this Smashingmagazine article.

I wish you good luck.