I’m not an email spam alarmist. If you’ve read any of my stuff you know that I think “opt out” email is perfectly acceptable under most circumstances… and in any event there’s not much we can do about it, even if we don’t like it.

But I would think a credible company (like I assume Kohls is) would have a simple opt-out (unsubscribe) policy.

Not Kohls. After you unsubscribe they tell you your email address will be removed within seven days, during which time you may receive a couple more “alerts”.

This is BS. I suspect it is an out and out corporate lie. I have now unsubscribed at least three times over the course of the last two weeks or so.

We’ll see what happens. In any event I won’t be buying from Kohls…wherever they are.

One of the difficulties with this system is that it relies on getting visitors to your websites. That’s the old “traffic problem” rearing its ugly head again. Getting traffic is not easy.

This is a major problem if you are appealing to a local market with a relatively limited number of prospects.

An “opt-in” system like this will very likely miss the majority of your target market. Why? Because it is too passive. There is a very good chance that many in your target market will never see your website, in spite of your best efforts to get them there.

This is especially the case with local businesses. For example, let’s say you want to start a local business and entertainment portal. Your portal will feature a directory of local businesses and a bit of local news. Your idea is to turn it into an advertising vehicle for local businesses.

But how will you reach local businesses?

You can try to build traffic to your site by doing SEO. You can spend money on advertising in local media. You can do Pay Per Click on Google, MSN, Yahoo or Facebook. You can try to find local business groups online and get involved in social networking with them.

But somewhere along the line you will probably have to reach these people directly. You need to take a page from the traditional sales play book and do some good old fashioned “direct” marketing. And direct marketing usually means one of three things: cold calling, telephone canvassing or direct mail.

Of these three traditional techniques, the one that fits the online marketing mindset the best is the direct mail approach.

The Direct Mail Approach

In the offline world using direct mail to promote a business-oriented product is a no-brainer. You would pull together a mailing list of as many local business as you could find, then you would develop a mailer or two and send them to everyone on your list.

This is such a common practice in the offline world that its power, effectiveness and legitimacy are just taken for granted. They are rarely ever questioned.

Is it possible to use a similar technique with email campaigns?

First you would decide on your target market – in our local portal example it would include local businesses looking for places to advertise

Second, you would do whatever you could to assemble an email list of these people.

Third, you would send a series of email messages to them.

Pretty simple, right?

Yes and no.

Why This Goes Against the Grain…and Why You Should Do It Anyway

In the world of web marketing, using this approach with email is often frowned upon. In fact I can’t ever remember hearing an internet marketer discuss such a methodology.

Anything other than a straightforward opt-in approach like the Gather-Capture-Convert system gets lumped into the general category of “spam”.

There are good reasons for this. As I have suggested in other places, for the past 10 years or so internet marketers have been almost completely fixated on a relatively small and quite unique market. This market is an interesting mix of independent entrepreneurs, work at home moms, network marketers and get rich quick con artists.

The “opt out” approach would simply not work with this group. Why? Because it is an ever-changing group that is very difficult to define and has an amazingly complex variety of interests. A big part of the marketing job with these people is sifting through their interests and identifying the ones who might be interested in your products.

This is what we might call “niche identification.” There is no better technique for doing this than an opt-in GCC system. People will simply not opt-in if they are not interested in what you have to offer.

Local Businesses Are Different

But niche-identification is not the problem with local business people. Local business people are already niche-identified. Dentists, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, restaurant owners, etc., etc., etc.

The problem with these people is not identifying which niche they belong to. That job is already done for us. The problem with local business people is simply getting your hands on their working email addresses and then tactfully getting your messages in front of them.

The Opt-Out Method Explained

Experience tells us that the only way you can effectively reach most local businesses is by adapting one of the standard offline approaches that have been used by sales and marketing people for decades. And by far the easiest technique to transpose over to the online world is the direct mail model.

This model says you have to get contact information from wherever it is available. You have to pull it from your Rolodex, from your collection of local business cards, from contact lists available from your business associations, from organizations like the local Chamber of Commerce, from brochures and advertising materials you pick up around town or receive in the mail. In other words, from wherever you can find it.

And then you have to assume they want to receive your information unless they tell you otherwise.

In a nutshell the opt-out method requires you to pull together a list of email addresses for your target market – local businesses – and then assume they are on your list until they ask to be taken off.

That is why I call it the “opt-out” method.

Is this Spamming?

As I’ve pointed out in other places, the regulations laid out in the U.S.A. Can-Spam Act of 2003 do not consider this spamming. Those regulations do not say you can only send email campaigns to opt-in subscribers.

What they do say is that you must be truthful in your messages, and you must give people an obvious way to opt-out of receiving future messages.

Another thing these regulations do not say, but that is still blatantly obvious, is that you should not abuse your contacts or send messages to people where it is likely to do more harm than good. Poorly conceived email campaigns can alienate the very people you want to turn into customers.

What most people absolutely hate is receiving messages from anonymous sources who don’t reveal why they are sending these messages to them. “How did this person get my email address?” is one of the first things people ask when they receive unsolicited email messages.

It is almost as if they consider such unsolicited messages an invasion of their privacy.

Almost, but not quite. Because in our testing over the years we have found that the vast majority of people will accept (and perhaps even happily accept) your message if you treat them with respect and do not abuse the privilege of contacting them directly by email.

How To Introduce Yourself

Here is a brief list of what you must do in your very first email to an opt-out list:

1. Tell them who you are. Do NOT be anonymous.
2. Tell them how you got their email address.
3. Tell them why you are contacting them.
4. Tell them you appreciate them reading your message.
5. Tell them you are sorry if they would rather not be on your list.
6. Give them an obvious way to unsubscribe.

And then, most important,

7. Give them an offer that is too good to pass up.

When you do all these things, most people will actually want to be on your list. The few who don’t can simply unsubscribe.

So that is the “opt-out” system in broad general outline. If you are interested in some practical suggestions for implementing an opt-out system like the one I’ve described here you can find them in the ecourse “The Next Web Marketing Gold Mine”. In that course I offer some suggestions for finding addresses, describe a simple system for entering them into your autoresponder, and provide a template for your introductory email message to your new list.

You can subscribe here to the ecourse

[NOTE: This course is no longer available]

Often when people ask me “What do you do?” I say something like: “I do online publishing, promotion and advertising for companies” and one response I often get is “Oh you mean you do that email spam stuff?”

Well, no that is not what I mean, but the sad truth is that email marketing has gotten a bad name because spammers indiscriminately send out millions of unsolicited email messages.

In spite of the abuse known as spam, the fact remains that email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with people online – and that includes advertising and promotion – communicating information about products and services.

The reason is simple: there is no better or less expensive way to get your message directly in front of real people interested in buying what you have to offer.

Legitimate Email Marketing Strategies

Let me reemphasize that I am not talking about email spam here. As I use the term, “email spam” means “inappropriately sending email messages to large numbers of people (email addresses) who you have no legitimate right to send them to.”

In spite of what many online marketers have been told, this does not mean that you can only send advertising messages to people who have “opted in” to your list. I know it is sacreligious to say this, but the fact is, current US law, namely the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, does not say you can only send commercial email messages (advertising) to people who have opted-in to your list.

What it does say is, in summary:

1. Your “from” and “subject” lines must be truthful and accurate.
2. You must include a legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser.
3. Each message must contain a visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism.
4. “Adult” oriented messages must be labeled as such in the subject line.
4. You cannot send to “harvested”* email addresses.*

In other words, as long as you are truthful in your message, include a real physical address and an opt-out mechanism, and don’t use “harvested” email addresses, you are in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.

Is Opt-In Really Superior?

So what the CAN-SPAM Act does is it puts the onus on the recipient of the message to “opt-out”, and it attaches penalties to advertisers who do not honor the opt-out requests in a timely manner. Opting-out is where the action is with the CAN-SPAM Act, not opting-in.

Having said that, most internet marketers claim to believe that building a true “opt-in” list is the ultimate objective from the marketing point of view. It is better because (in theory) people who have requested to be on your list are much more accurately “targeted” and are therefore (in theory) much more likely to buy your products. According to the orthodox theory, they are more accurately targeted because they have actually requested to be on your list.

But there are problems with the “opt-in” theory as it is applied in practice.

First, many marketers get you on their “opt-in” list by offering a freebie – a free report, ebook, video, or software program. Once you are on their list they assume that gives them “permission” to send you whatever promotional messages they want.

But this is a murky assumption to say the least. What they are really trying to do is not get your “permission”, but simply an operational email address – one that you actually use. After that point their rationale for continuing to send you messages you had no idea you were agreeing to is “Well, you can always unsubscribe, can’t you?”

And that is exactly the same rationale given by the person using a non-opt-in list: “Well, you can always unsubscribe, can’t you?”

Second, most opt-in lists are not nearly as targeted as they claim to be. For example, it is a common practice among internet marketers to build a list based on a free sample of Product A – let’s say it is an ebook about Search Engine Optimization – and then turn around and promote Products B, C and D to that list. These other products could be almost anything: video courses on building websites, expensive make-money-online conferences, even electronic gadgets or pharmaceuticals.

Internet marketers have also been known to team up and share lists. For example, you sign up for Billy Marketer’s free report on “Writing Ebooks”, and then before you know it you are receiving pitches from Angie Marketer for her video course on “Building Websites”. Did you opt-in to Angie’s list? Well, according to Angie you did because she and Billy are “partners” in this venture.

Another popular way that internet marketers share lists is the so-called “Joint Venture”. Over the years Jim Marketer builds up a list of 50,000 names or so and then thru an arrangement called a “joint venture” agrees to promote Billy’s products to his list in exchange for a healthy share of the profits.

But when you “opted-in” to Jim’s list, were you agreeing to receive messages promoting anything that Jim decides to throw at you? Well, apparently Jim thinks so.

Let Common Sense Prevail

My point here is not to suggest that you should forget about building an “opt-in” list, or even that the techniques used by internet marketers are somehow illegitimate. My point is that there isn’t much difference between a properly run email campaign sent to an opt-in list and a similarly properly run campaign sent to a non-opt-in list. My own experience with lists is that they are very useful, and can be very profitable. But I have not been convinced that “opt-in” lists are automatically better than some of the alternatives.

For example, if you were selling web design services and wanted to focus on your local market, would an email list of local businesses be useful? Yes of course you would have to develop a tactful, well-thought-out campaign. But surely such a campaign could yield impressive results if conducted properly.

Or let’s say you had a product targeted at accountants. Would a list of 25,000 accountants be useful? Of course it would.

Would you be engaging in “spamming” if you sent “unsolicited” messages to that list? Well, according to the CAN-SPAM act you would only be spamming if you did not comply with their rules (see above). And if the campaign was conducted in a sensible way it could be very fruitful indeed.

References:
*According to the CAN-SPAM act a “harvested” email address is one that is acquired using an automated collection or extraction system.

For more details on the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, see this Wikipedia article.

As explained in his video, this little program lets you search for blogs by keyword. It goes out and finds blogs relevant to your keywords, tells you their PR, the PR of the actual pages it finds, and also tells you whether it is a “nofollow” or “do follow” blog. In case you’re not aware, a “do follow” blog is one in which the Google-inspired “nofollow” tag is deactivated so that links in comments actually get (a little bit of) link juice. Google has come convoluted reasons for encouraging the use of “nofollow”, and most bloggers are in love with Google, so there you go.

G-Lock Blog Finder then lets you click on the address of a specific post and it then shows that post in a window where you can create a comment (and leave your link of course.)

Now if you think it sounds just a bit anal to spend an hour or so every now and then to find random “targeted” blogs, do a cursory reading of the content, and then leave a comment for the purpose of getting a link, I completely concur. Most SEO experts think links from blog comments are, at best, of minimal value anyway, so spending any time at all generating such links seems like a pretty pointless way to waste your life away.

If these links actually were worth anything that would be a different matter, I guess. But first, there is the “nofollow” issue – which most blogs adhere to (rightly or wrongly). Second there is the question “Don’t I have anything better to do with my time?” And third you will inevitably ask “Do I really want to read this crap?” since so many blogs – even the ones turned up by a program like G-Lock Blog Finder – are little more than self-congratulating navel gazing.

On the other hand, finding relevant blogs can be a very useful exercise. Some blogs actually have very interesting content, a fair bit of traffic, and offer you a place where you can both learn something about your niche and meet others who are also interested in it. In other words, they perform the same function as social networking sites do – they let you get involved with others in your area(s) of interest.

No doubt this can turn out to be one of the most important sources of traffic to your site. Not because you have created a bunch of backlinks and have thereby improved your search engine rankings (although I suppose that may happen occasionally), but rather because you have entered into “the conversation” with others who share some of your interests, and they see some value in having a look at your site from time to time.

So I suggest you forget about looking for blogs based on the value you might squeeze out of them by leaving comments. Instead, I suggest you look for blogs that offer you useful content that can teach you something and a lively community of readers who might be interested in hearing what you have to contribute to the conversation.

To come (more or less) full circle, a tool like G-Lock Blog Finder might actually help you find blogs like this. So it is at least worth a look.

You can download a free trial version of G-Lock Blog Finder here.

For instance, I belong to a video uploading service where it has been recommended that the same video be uploaded to the same site with some minor changes in order to multiply exposure, backlinks, etc. The suggestion is that certain things about the video be changed for each upload – the title, the tags, the description, the encoded format – but not the actual content of the video itself.

Others in other contexts have suggested that the openness and current Google-love towards social bookmarking sites can be exploited by opening several accounts and bookmarking the same sites in each account. The discussion as to the appropriateness of these practices is always “Can I get away with it?”, “Will I get banned?” This is similar to a discussion about the morality of stealing or murder focusing on whether or not we will get caught. But anybody who has ever thought about “good” and “bad” knows that there are other, “deeper” reasons why we should not condone things like lying, stealing, murder, fraud, etc.

This also goes for spam. Spam is not bad because we can’t get away with it. It is bad because it is deceptive and attempts to misuse our trust relationship with the site owner. Spammers are essentially cheaters. They are breaking the rules that the rest of us have agreed upon. And in bending the rules or pretending to obey them they are intentionally being deceitful.

For instance, if I say to someone, “You can leave comments on my blog as long as they are on topic and have some substance,” a person who simply ignores this rule and leaves off-topic, insubstantial comments is misusing the privilege I have extended to him.

I could care less what Google thinks of this. It is ME he has done a disservice to.

So it is not about what works as much as it is about the “contract” between the user and the site owner. If the video site owner makes it clear that videos are supposed to be original, then submitting the same video in a different format is breaking the contract.

Of course you can say that doesn’t matter because Google (so far) hasn’t found a way to monitor this type of abuse. But, as I ‘ve said, that misses the more important point: you are breaking your agreement with the site owner.

Wouldn’t it be better to actually submit “different” videos – videos with slightly different content? So when creating a video, create four or five different versions of it by changing a few things around, changing the title slides, changing some text around….

Yes, this would probably take more time. But wouldn’t that be the ethically correct thing to do?