Can the Spam in Your Email Newsletter

Everybody who uses email is familiar with spam. That junk email that fills up the spam filter and occasionally trickles into the inbox. Everything from letters from the uncles in Nigeria you didn't know you had to the wonder drugs that not even our doctors didn't even know existed.

In order to attempt to combat spam, the federal government passed a law in 2003 called the CAN-SPAM act. The bill regulates commercial email in three broad areas. First, you have to handle unsubscribe requests in certain, specific ways. Second, you have to follow certain content guidelines, such as including your address. Third, the email has to follow certain measures while sending the message.

While the merits, necessity and effectiveness of the law are debatable, what isn't debatable is that when you send out a commercial email message to your customers you want to make sure you are in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. While you may or may not be caught, you don't really want to take the chance of being penalized by the FTC.

How, then, do you stay in compliance with the CAN-SPAM law? The easiest way to do so is to use a service that verifies you are, in fact, in compliance with the CAN-SPAM law. In other words, don't send out your bulk email from Outlook and don't send out bulk email from custom built programs on your website.

The service I typically recommend to my clients to stay in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act is Vertical Response. Vertical Response actually verifies every email sent out to ensure that it is not spam - in addition to requiring you to follow all of the CAN-SPAM requirements. As a result, not only are you in compliance with the CAN-SPAM law, but you are also assured that your email will more than likely not be caught in spam filters.

When you hire QW Consulting to do your email newsletter, I do a similar check as well to make sure that you aren't sending spam, but also to make sure you are following all the good practices of sending an email newsletter. Any web company you go to that does email newsletters should do the same.

If you want to get started on your email newsletter contact QW Consulting today.

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