The biggest danger of doing email broadcasting, is not running afoul of the law (that is, the CAN-SPAM act). If you are a legitimate business that is easy to comply with.

Internet Service Providers have a MUCH lower threshold. While it is legal to send unsolicited email under CAN-SPAM, it violates the Terms of Service of pretty much every ISP and email subscription broadcast service in the country. Also most ISPs have limits on how many emails you can send per hour or day.

This is a subject you MUST address to run a successful email marketing campaign. If you do not, your are likely to get black-listed and shut down by your ISP.

You don’t want to come in to work one day and find out you have no Internet connection or your website’s been taken down.

Or find out you’ve been listed in Spam Data Bases and your email traffic is all being automatically junked at the other end.

There are basically two solutions:

The first is to use only “double opt-in” email lists. That means no matter how you obtain an email address, you then send the person an email to CONFIRM that they want to receive email from you. If they don’t reply positively, you don’t send to them.

This is the only method that actually, fully complies with the Terms of Service of ISPs (so long as you aren’t trying to send too many emails in too short a period of time), and of subscription email broadcast services such as Constant Contact.

However, it has a major liability to it. You lose by far the largest percentage of your email addresses. Even if someone would welcome your email, they may not notice or reply to your “opt-in” confirmation email.

So what is a person to do?

Read on in part 2….