Ethical Email Marketing

Ethical email marketing can only happen if the list owners are ethical small business owners. We have all signed up to someone’s list to receive more information about a subject that has interested us. Most have had a notice below the subscription sign-in box clearly stating that our email address would be safe and would never be sold or abused.

Giving full credit to the majority of internet marketers working online this has been the case. But what has happened with the other 1%?  Leaving spam-bots out of this equation for once, there are some unethical marketers out there who sell their unsubscribed list once they are no longer active list members.

So what are Ethics in this instance? 

Ethics are holding to your word regardless of changed circumstances.  Just because someone for whatever reason, has unsubscribed from your list does not mean that your word of “no selling or abuse in any way” is no longer applicable. 

Once you have said something or given ‘your word’ that something won’t happen, then you change the conditions without warning when your relationship changes, is simply unacceptable behavior and constitutes unethical marketing. 

Just because you have their email address but no longer need it, does not mean that your promise isn’t applicable any more. A promise is a promise and you have already said what you will and won’t do with their email address. You have implied that it will never be sold or abused and this written promise is exactly what any ethical marketer will honor. 

Now if you had said in your subscription box that after unsubscribing from this list, that your email address may be sold or re-used by someone else that would have been ethical. Probably very impractical because no one in their right frame of mind would ever sign up! 

Trust and truth are implied when you say something, and totally destroyed when you break your word.

Trust and Truth

Are very fragile conditions even in the “real” world, but when you can’t see people face-to-face to assess the character of a person it becomes even more difficult and so there are many more people who have their trust betrayed by unethical people. 

List Sellers

Unethical marketers who sell their unsubscribed lists are adding to their own problems if they are also list buyers. Just because your list may have come from a group of gym-junkies and that is what their interests were, if you sell your small list to a list buyer and they are short of a few hundred email address at some point, guess what they are most likely to do? That’s right, they will add your email list of gym-junkies into whatever list they are short on numbers for and sell your list that way. They have already proven to be unethical so what is to stop them doing that?

List Buying 

List buying may look like the fast track to a perceived end but the end is too often very different to what you’re hoping it will be. To buy email addresses to market a product to, that the person has not specifically requested, is much like buying “a pig in a poke” as you are not target marketing your efforts and money to an audience who may even be just a little bit interested in what you are trying to sell them.  

Just because you think you are buying a list of chiropractors, accountants, dentists or internet marketers or any other professional list doesn’t mean that those email addresses actually belong to someone in a market that you are trying to reach. Just because someone says they do, doesn’t make it so. 

Unethical email marketing simply annoys people; the spam filters, the search engines and gives other internet marketers a ‘bad name’ so is it worth the price?