MANAGE & LEAD
If that isn’t enough, sharing your list annoys people. Think
about your personal experience with unsolicited email, like
when you wonder how a company you’ve never heard of
got into your inbox. Does it annoy you? Yes.
Do you open it? No.
So why risk annoying your customers with an email that
they’re probably not going to open anyway?
HOW DO I BACK-SCRATCH
& SHARE CLIENTS?
If a partner organization wants to use your list, or if you’re
going to borrow another organization’s email list, you have
some options:
Ask the organization whose list you want to use to send
an email on your behalf. They can send a dedicated
email asking their customers to check out whatever it
is you’re trying to “sell.”
Or, better yet, they can incorporate a callout about your
organization into an email that they’re already planning
to send out.
Sharing that information with third-parties is a direct
violation of that trust. The price you pay for breaking that
trust extends far beyond what a customer thinks about
your email program, and not just as a violation of the
CAN-SPAM Act. Customers will start to wonder what else
your organization does behind their back with their private
information. They will question your truthfulness, integrity,
and intentions. That is not how you want your customers
to think about your organization. Additionally, if email
service providers (e.g., Mail Chimp, Vertical Response,
Constant Contact, Infusionsoft) find out that you’ve shared
your list, or worse yet, emailed a list of people who have
not explicitly indicated that they want emails from the
organization, they will flag your account and the account
that owns the record as spammers. Once you are flagged
as a spammer, none of the emails you send, or that the
organization you’ve shared a list with sends, will never ever
make it to the customer’s inbox again.
That callout can encourage their subscribers to check out
your organization and become a subscriber themselves.
This approach builds trust among consumers for both
the sending organization and the partnering organization.
Send an email to your customers with a callout about the
organization that wants to use your list. In this case, you
should try to incorporate their callout into an email that you
are already planning to send (e.g., monthly e-newsletter),
and that’s full of relevant content that the subscriber is
expecting to see.
An email that’s sent from your program, that’s all about
another organization, could still be considered spam. Tying
partner content into your regular email communications
will undoubtedly make it appear less spammy and help
ensure that your readers know you have their best interest
in mind.
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