This is part 3 of my “Your Website Needs to Get a Job” series. We’re talking about ‘thai chicken’ and lead gen tools. If you don’t know what that means right away, you might want to get caught up with part 1 and part 2.
In part 2, I mentioned the dreaded CAN-SPAM Act. Eek!
It’s not that the Act itself is a bad thing – in fact, it’s great. But, the Act has effectively penalized honest companies that want to market their products and services, right along with spammers. Not so great.
When you’re setting up your ‘thai chicken’ (a.k.a. lead generation tool), you need to get permission to market to the person requesting the chicken sample – both now and in the future. Ok, Lena, how do I do that?
The Now Takes Care of Itself
The fact that the person is requesting the information means you have permission to send them whatever they are requesting immediately – so that effectively takes care of itself.
The Future, However, is Another Story
We’ve all seen how small those sign up forms are. How do you get permission for the future?
It’s all in the wording, dear Watson.
Take a look at what we say on our website for our Technology Strategy Workbook:
Sign-up to receive your free “Technology Strategy & Planning Guide”, along with our regular publication,The X Dossier.
The “along with our regular publication” grants us permission to send our e-zine, updates, etc., in the future.
This languaging is critical to ensure future marketing permission. This way, if someone ever says they didn’t agree to receiving your newsletter, you can show them their IP address (more on this in part 4) and direct them back to the verbiage on your site – and, that solves that.
Bottomline: If you’ve set up your ‘chicken’, are you getting permission to market to requesters in the future? If not, you’re presenting a potential liability for yourself and possibly damaging your brand. What company wants to be known as the company that spams?
This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.2 Responses to “Your Website Needs to Get a Job – Part 3”
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October 9th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Very cool. I’m even feeling motivated about creating an ezine. Thanks for your infotaining blog.
Michelle
http://weekend.entrepreneur.com
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Michelle:
Great! That’s the objective.
A ezine doesn’t always have to reinvent the wheel though.
You can put an intro paragraph and then link back to your hot blgo posts for the week/month.
More and more people are starting to use this strategy. It drives traffic to your blog and you also get the benefit of reaching out to your list on a regular basis.
I always tell our clients to NEVER give up their ezine (especially if it’s successful) because they’re putting up a blog. Keep your blog going and go for the ezine…you can get the benefit of marketing exposure without much more work.
Thanks for being inspired,
-Lena