Newsletters are a fine thing. They help you keep in touch with your customers, and remind them how much they enjoy your products. With your brand fresh in the mind of your subscribers, they’re more likely to buy from you again – assuming you manage the relationship correctly.
So this is the tale of two companies, told to me by a friend. I'm repeating it here in the hopes that others will learn from it. The names and the fields have been changed to protect the innocent. I'm almost tempted to say "criminally innocent." It's hard to remember sometimes, after writing about technology as long as I have, that there are plenty of people who don't understand something that seems to be common sense. That includes people who should know better.
But let me start my friend's story. She works for a company whose online business caters to crafters of various stripes: those who sew, those who knit and crochet, those who embroider, etc. One of the ways it keeps crafters coming back to visit is with its two regular newsletters, one that appeals to general crafters and another that appeals specifically to jewelry artists.
Just a couple of years or so ago (this was before my friend's time), someone at the company discovered that not everyone who was receiving the general newsletter had actually signed up for it. My friend was weak on the technical details; the company had forums for crafters, and it was possible that some databases got confused, so that someone registering for the forums got signed up for the newsletter as well. This had to be traced down and tracked back, as the company discovered (quite belatedly and unintentionally) that they had been put on a list of spammers by one of the major independent organizations that covers this kind of thing.
In case you aren't familiar with it, there are organizations such as Spamhaus that maintain lists of IP addresses that send unsolicited bulk email, otherwise known as spam. Many major ISPs subscribe to these lists in order to block spammers. If you find yourself on such a list, usually known as a black list, you may find your mail is not getting through, including newsletters to which users have legitimately subscribed. It is possible to get off black lists, but the offender must seriously clean up his act to do so.
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