By Bryan Robison, Senior Data Specialist
Email is one of the most effective & cost-efficient ways to market your company’s products & services. It’s also a great way to reach out to new customers and to stay in contact with current ones. However, before hitting the “send” button on your next email marketing campaign, you need to ensure that it won’t be flagged as spam and that it complies with the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act.
What exactly is ‘spam’? According to Spamhaus.com, an electronic message is "spam" if (A) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (B) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent. In other words, it’s all about consent and not content.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was enacted to help control the proliferation of unsolicited bulk email; to give recipients a way to opt out of receiving unsolicited messages; and to lay out penalties for violations. Some of the major requirements of this law include:
1) Use accurate headers, such as your “From,” “To,” & “Reply-To” names
2) Subject line must correlate to the content of email message
3) The message must include a valid physical postal address
4) Plainly give your recipients the choice to opt-out of receiving any future emails
5) Handle any & all opt-out requests promptly
And, CAN-SPAM is enforced. Just ask Kodak & ICE.com. Kodak Imaging Network sent over 2 million messages that didn't have an unsubscribe link or a physical address included in their emails. They were fined $26,000; not a pretty picture. ICE.com sent an email marketing campaign to 6,000 recipients who had previously unsubscribed. Their penalty: $6,500 in cold, hard cash.
Designing beautiful, catchy, interesting and/or whimsical email messages is the easy part; the hard part is ensuring that your recipients have opted-in and that you are CAN-SPAM compliant. Because your email messages are all about consent, not necessarily content.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Social Media and Blogs
By Jeff Komlos, Information Technology Project Manager
I thought I would have a little fun with the irony of this week’s topic. My blog topic this week is all about Social Media, picking a blog topic and writing a valuable article. I was having trouble becoming motivated to select a topic to discuss, so I referred back to some information I had passed along to our internal team about writing blogs. At that point, I decided that there was a lot of value in the information provided, and it would be worthwhile to share. If you search the web, there are a lot of great sources that provide advice on blog authoring. I have collected what I believe to be a strong list of guidelines for writing posts. These guidelines won’t be an exact fit for everyone, but seem to work very well for us at FCi. The first question to ask is: What can Social Media do for you?
Social Media will:
• Provide a “Call to Action” for your customers.
• Push information to your client base, both current clients and potential clients.
• Give your potential customers a chance to “get to know you” before they actually get to know you.
• Provide a platform that allows your current customers to “sell” for you. Most of these tools will empower your customer base to provide information for you, taking some of the burden off of you. They will become content contributors.
• Show that you are cutting edge and willing to make the effort to include the younger generation in your direct marketing efforts.
Now, what about a blog? A blog is a great tool for showing expertise in a field or industry. As mentioned above, it allows your current and potential customer base to “get to know you”. Here are several tips you may want to consider when writing a blog post.
• Keep your content fresh. Stale, old content not only hurts search rankings, but it doesn't give your audience a reason to come back. Try to, at the very least, post new blogs once a week, more if you can.
• Websites are a reflection of your business and blogs are no different. Keep your blog informal, but don't cross the line of professionalism. Keep content high quality with correct grammar, no misspelled words or politically incorrect content.
• Feel free to also include small articles from guests you invite to participate, or create a post that is just a link to another site with some comments prepared by your group. Blogs can also feature guest writers that may have useful information to share with your customers. Such guests would be other professionals related to your industry or type of product you sell.
• Your blog should read more like a journal entry and less like an advertisement. Too much advertising can turn readers off from reading your blog, so make sure to be somewhat subtle.
I thought I would have a little fun with the irony of this week’s topic. My blog topic this week is all about Social Media, picking a blog topic and writing a valuable article. I was having trouble becoming motivated to select a topic to discuss, so I referred back to some information I had passed along to our internal team about writing blogs. At that point, I decided that there was a lot of value in the information provided, and it would be worthwhile to share. If you search the web, there are a lot of great sources that provide advice on blog authoring. I have collected what I believe to be a strong list of guidelines for writing posts. These guidelines won’t be an exact fit for everyone, but seem to work very well for us at FCi. The first question to ask is: What can Social Media do for you?
Social Media will:
• Provide a “Call to Action” for your customers.
• Push information to your client base, both current clients and potential clients.
• Give your potential customers a chance to “get to know you” before they actually get to know you.
• Provide a platform that allows your current customers to “sell” for you. Most of these tools will empower your customer base to provide information for you, taking some of the burden off of you. They will become content contributors.
• Show that you are cutting edge and willing to make the effort to include the younger generation in your direct marketing efforts.
Now, what about a blog? A blog is a great tool for showing expertise in a field or industry. As mentioned above, it allows your current and potential customer base to “get to know you”. Here are several tips you may want to consider when writing a blog post.
• Keep your content fresh. Stale, old content not only hurts search rankings, but it doesn't give your audience a reason to come back. Try to, at the very least, post new blogs once a week, more if you can.
• Websites are a reflection of your business and blogs are no different. Keep your blog informal, but don't cross the line of professionalism. Keep content high quality with correct grammar, no misspelled words or politically incorrect content.
• Feel free to also include small articles from guests you invite to participate, or create a post that is just a link to another site with some comments prepared by your group. Blogs can also feature guest writers that may have useful information to share with your customers. Such guests would be other professionals related to your industry or type of product you sell.
• Your blog should read more like a journal entry and less like an advertisement. Too much advertising can turn readers off from reading your blog, so make sure to be somewhat subtle.
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