I like the concept of email marketing, but it is very difficult to build up a reasonable list of email addresses to market to. You need to recruit those users initially and get them to agree to be contacted for it to be effective. I've slowly been building up email addresses via blog comments, but I'm loathe to mail bomb them all as I never directly told many of them that by providing their email address would result in me using it for marketing purposes. There was an implication of that in the way I collected them, but I didn't explicitly state it until recently and even now 50% of the addresses I collect have not given that explicit permission unfortunately..
There are of course the scum bags out there who spam the heck out of all of us via giant email lists they have purchased, but I sincerely hope those people do not make any money.
Do any of you have any good tips on how to collect email addresses for marketing purposes in an ethical way?
|