Is Spam Affecting Your Business Email?

5 Ways Spam Is Affecting Your Business And what we can alldo to prevent it.

If you had only just got online, and received your firstfew emails, you may be forgiven for thinking you had hitpaydirt.

You would already have heard how you won millions on aforeign lottery, then some benevolent foreigner wants togive you more millions because a relative has died and heneeds help to get his inheritance, and you're someone hecan trust. And as luck would have it, those personal bodyparts you don't discuss with anyone are actually too small,but a few people can help you with that for a very low fee.And you have all that Cas.h coming so.....

But you're a seasoned veteran, and none of that is worthyour time, it's just so much spam.

You probably don't even see any of it.

Don't give it a second thought.

Maybe you need to.

It is because it is so easy and cheap to send email thatyou as a marketer want to use it,and spammers selling dodgypills want to exploit it. They send out a million untargetedmessages in a few hours, and rely on the fact that even ifonly 1 or 2 % of the people they sent it to bu.y their waresthey will be in Profi.t.

You try to send a more targeted mailing, but due to thespammers all email is being vetted more carefully, and spamis hurting all of our businesses, even responsible marketerslike you who wouldn't even think about using it.

Here are the 5 reasons you should consider theimplications of spam more carefully.

1 The time it takes to sort your emails is increased, butyou can always use filters or antispam software. Whichbrings us to

2 False positives in antispam software means, if you don'tcheck the filtered out spam, you may miss a valuablecontact from a customer. So you have to check it allanyway.

3 Your customers use spam blockers, or their isps do so youneed to rethink your newsletter or email to your list ofprospects so you don't trigger theirs.

4 Due to the amount of people you can reach with email, youare more likely to encounter someone who reports you forspam even after they signed up and double opted into yournewsletter. Result:- your domain gets blacklisted, and youspend time undoing the damage.

5 People are more wary about giving their e-mail addressesout so it's harder work getting them to sign up for yournewsletter in the first place. You need an easy to findprivacy promise on your site.

Because so many people have used spam to sell theirproducts, we all suffer.

Even with all these spam related problems, email remains aviable and usable option for Online marketin.g, but it needsa bit more care than it did before.

Governments may be stepping in and passing laws to outlawspam, but the spammers themselves will move their serversto a safe place with a more tolerant government. We need todo our bit to keep email as an advertising option and playsafe.

Consider putting your newsletters online and sending ashort email with the link to the latest issue in it.Never bu.y from a spammers email, and despite some adviceyou may have seen to the contrary it is unwise to try toreply to unsubscribe, that just proves they have an emailaddress which is live.

Be careful where you get leads from if you bu.y them, someunscrupulous companies will sell you email lists harvestedstraight from website mailto links.

CD's full of 1000's of names are not a good buy to marketto, they will have been sold and sold again, and the peoplewhose email addresses are on them will have been sent toomany offers already.

Always email responsibly, and ensure you give people aplain privacy link, and an even more plain unsubscrib.e linkin every email.

Douglas Titchmarsh runs several websites, and blogs including http://www.cashinonline.info and http://www.titchmarsh.com