January 2004 extra edition: Can Spam Act

Dear Reader,

first of all I wish you a Happy New Year 2004 and a lot of personal and business success this year.

I bet you´ve already set a few goals for this year and I sincerely wish you will achieve them.

This year started with a little bit of confusion and fear for some internet marketers, the Can Spam Act of 2003 has come into force by the 1st of january 2004 (Public Law No. 108-187).

Smart Gurus take up on the confusion and offer 40$ teleseminars but you should really save that money and read the law text by yourself instead.
http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html

pay attention to these two sections:

SEC. 5. Other protections for users of commercial electronic email
SEC. 9. Do-not-email registry

Honestly - there isn´t anything scaring about it because is has little or no effect for serious marketers.

Interesting fact that the law doesn´t prohibit the use of unsolicited commercial email as far as it complies with the requirements defined in section 5 of the Can Spam Act. (which usually none of the UCEs I get does)

The only change I have to do in some of my emails is to include a physical mailing address. But not in this one, because it´s not of commercial nature.

There are some details I still see in many well respected marketers´ emails that could get them in trouble, like:
1) no easy one-click unsubscribe link
2) misleading subject lines
(do you too get emails from the "gurus" with subjects like "your check is ready" "about your commissions" or similar trying to SELL you something?)
3) no functioning reply address

If you only send email to people who have asked for, include an easy unsubscribe link and make the subject representing the email body´s content then you are on the save side.

My Opinion about Double Opt in: very recommended with exceptions.

very recommended in the following case:

1) 1st subscriptions to ecourses or newsletters:

Still many publishers don´t use double opt in because they fear to lose subscribers and I must admit they are right.

I use the Double Opt In procedure for my newsletter and ecourses and I do lose some subscribers due to non-confirmation but unlike other publishers, I´m glad about that !

The only people that I want to have on my newsletter list are people like you - who are sincerely interested in my publication. If I really want to subscribe to an ezine, I´m looking forward to the confirmation email and I DO confirm my subscription.

Ok, somebody might accidentially delete the confirmation email, but he/she is still in my database, so I just send a second one.

Fact is that if you have a subscription form on your website and/or your ezine (like mine) is listed in directories including an email subscription link, you will also get fake subscriptions and you can only weed them out using the double opt in procedure.

I could set my AR to filter out certain domains like zwallet, hotmail, yahoo and other free email providers. But there are many people (affiliate marketers without a website or newbies for example) that want to get my ezine and do check their free email accounts, so why should I deny them the opportunity to get my newsletter?

However - in the following two cases I don´t use Double Opt in:

1) customer registrations

2) repeat subscriptions, for example a special interest mailing list for existing subscribers.

In the end - it´s your choice if you want to use double opt in or not. I hope that I could help a little bit.

Look out for TheJungleMarketer´s special edition on the coming Friday with amazing news about the SEO live experiment AND how it happened step-by-step.

Talk to you soon.

with best regards,

Guido W. Stiehle
The Jungle Marketer


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Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

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