Proper Email Collections

I had the pleasure of a guest speaker at the Art Institute of Atlanta. It was Ben Chestnut, cofounder of The Rocket Science Group, and they have a product called MailChimp. MailChimp offers emailing & reporting services for email campaigns. Mr. Chestnut shared some basic concepts surrounding proper email collection, and the types of mishaps that sometimes happen. Only people who have opted into your email list may receive emails from you. Sounds basic enough, but I just didn’t realize. I didn’t even realize there was a Spam Act of 2003. Other important items I learned: do not use the words “free” or “click here”, which will be misinterpreted as spam. Do not let a business email to their client base without a proper invitation to join the email list first. Don’t purchase email lists, either, that’s just obvious spamming. A fishbowl set up for people to drop business cards into is not proper email collection. Items that DO work for email collection: prizes! Small prizes work, even if it’s just a T-shirt with the company logo on it.