Why Do You Need Permission?

Permission to send someone an email is very important and regardless of how ISPs, filters, and blacklists decide which emails to block and which ones to let through, you should still practice due diligence in obtaining your customers and potential customers permission to email them. This way you can be assured that you have followed all of the laws surrounding this issue.

Spam is considered by most users are email they do not want and this can actually include email that customers subscribe to. Regardless of whether or not you have their permission to send it, they may not want it. Of course, you won’t know that unless they unsubscribe and tell you. Permissions can be faked by companies who use spiders to collect email lists and addresses from multiple sites and claim that the names all came from a legitimate list. Because emails addresses can go inactive, some sites that send out newsletters to these emails could be considered spamming when they are actually just bad at keeping up their lists. Finally, reputation systems in email filtering are becoming more common and use security, authentication and other metrics to filter email.

All of these factors make permission extremely important and shows how important it is to keep all of your email lists cleaned up and up to date. So, how should you define permission so that you are within your legal right to send out your email?

• They subscribed to your website by either filling out a form or ticking a checkbox on the form that clearly stated you would be contacting them via email. This is called an opt-in. A confirmed opt-in is when you send the potential customer an email confirming that they signed up and offering them the chance to immediately unsubscribe. A double opt-in is the same as a confirmed opt-in except the customer must respond back to you verifying that they received your confirmation email.

• A negative opt-in is where a customer fills out a form on your site and is required to uncheck the box that states you can contact them. If they don’t uncheck the box, you have permission to email them. Be forewarned, this could be misconstrued as spam.

• They completed one of your offline forms – a survey maybe – and indicated that you could contact them by email by checking off the box on the form.

• You met the person face to face and they gave you their business card and you told them you would contact them via email. If you got their card out of a fishbowl at a seminar or trade show, you can only contact them via email if you expressly stated so on a sign near the bowl.

• They bought something off of you – which gives you implicit permission to contact them. If you want to be sure you have their permission, put an opt-in check box on the purchase page.

You DO NOT have permission to contact people via email if you: got the addresses from a third party; you copy and pasted the address off the internet indiscriminately; and you haven’t emailed a former customer in over two years.

Always make sure you offer your readers a way to unsubscribe and remove them from your mailing list within a week of the request. This shows them that you are professional and understand that your mailings simply aren’t right for them.