Non Legal Spam Can Be Just As Devastating As Legal Spam

On December 17th, I published a post entitled, Sending E-Mail? Understand How The CAN-SPAM Act Applies To You. In it, I gave a brief summary of the CAN-SPAM Act and what you needed to be aware of if you sent e-mail.

The next day, a colleague of mine forwarded me a string of e-mails sent from her URL shortening service saying that the underlying URL domain being shortened had been flagged because of an unsolicited message violation. In fact, she sent 7 violation messages in all.

Why did she send them to me? Because the underlying URLs were from my MarketingTipsForAuthors.com domain. I was immediately puzzled for a number or reasons, but I didn't panic. I knew I didn't send any unsolicited e-mails. In fact, I use 1ShoppingCart.com, a service that has stringent guidelines in place to prevent spam.

First, I checked the status of my domain with the link provided by the URL shortening service that flagged my domain. My domain showed no issues. I then contacted the URL shortening service that had issued the flags against my URL. They sent the following message to me today:

We apologize for this issue. The service that we use to update us regarding possible spam links had an issue and began flagging {URL Shortening Service} links incorrectly. The flag has been removed from your links and all click traffic should be flowing as expected.

If you have any other issues, please let us know. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

Thank You,

Though I didn't panic, I was relieved to get this message. All is now good in my corner of the Internet. The truth is, being blacklisted can deliver a devastating blow to a company who has a significant portion of their business on the net. Careless indiscretions now can pay stiff penalties in the future.

As I said in the CAN-SPAM post, staying legal should not be your only concern. You need to make sure that you treat your subscribers as royalty. Even if you are not blacklisted, a simple unsubscribe click of the mouse can have the same effect on you.

Every list will have people continuously opting out, so that alone should not worry you as a list owner, but you should not act in a way that encourages people to opt out.

• Keep on topic- If people signed up for a marketing newsletter, make sure you are delivering marketing value to them.
  
  
• Keep ads in perspective- Most people will tolerate some ads coming from you, but they generally don't want to be on a list that sends out primarily ads. They are looking for the value they assumed they were signing up for when they joined the list.
  
  
• Diversify your messages- There are only so many ways of saying that Twitter is a good service to use. If you keep saying the same thing over and over, you will eventually limit your value to your subscribers.
  
  
• Interact- As much as possible, interact with your subscribers. Encourage them to e-mail you with questions/comments or set up a post that encourages open comments.
  

There are many other great suggestions that can help you treat your subscribers like loyalty and most of them are founded in plain old common sense. Treat others the way you would want to be treated. Do this and you will be well on your way to creating meaningful relationships that will last.

Tony Eldridge