Guest post by Marcel Oudejans.

I am fairly fortunate that I only receive a small number of ‘spam‘ emails every day, perhaps less than 10% the total number of emails I receive.  I use an effective ‘junk mail’ filter, and I don’t enter my primary email address into a form unless I’m certain the website owner has a good reputation.  You can lower the chances of receiving annoying spam messages by protecting your email address online, yet I find that even then one occasionally slips through.  Often the emails that manage to avoid my spam filter are from South African companies who still do not understand the ethics and laws of direct email marketing and frequently simply ‘trawl’ websites for email addresses.

The best way to avoid being added to spam lists to make sure that you never publish your email address online!  This is not practical, so make sure you protect your email address as ‘spambots’ may add it to spam mailing lists. I have found that some South African companies are so desperate to find new customers, they will happily search for websites of their target market, copy and paste any email addresses they find, and then send a mass broadcast of emails to this list.

In a moment, I’ll share some legal reasons why you should never be guilty of the act of send a mass mailing of unrequested emails.  But probably the most important reason why should not is because you will probably annoy those receivers so much that they are unlikely to ever do business with you.  Of course, when you get permission to send emails to your customers once they subscribe to a mailing list or auto-responder, then this form of marketing can be very effective.  But unrequested emails are often badly worded, inappropriate, and are mostly a worthless attempt to get the readers’ attention.  If the first impression I get of your company is that you will resort to annoying, unethical and/or illegal marketing methods to get my attention, then you can be certain that I am unlikely to like or trust you.  The result is that you’ve wasted your time finding all those email addresses, writing an email and waiting for a ‘miraculous’ increase in sales, when in fact you’ve annoyed your prospects, they’ve deleted the email, and added you to their spam list (which means they’ll never get emails from you again).

So how can you make sure that you are not considered a spammer? You can follow the guides set out in the Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Act.  According to section 45 of the ECT Act (Act 25 of 2002), a ‘unsubscribe’ link must always be clearly displayed in any subscription-based email message (including, but not limited to newsletters, notification lists & direct marketing sales enquiries).  You may also only send out mass emails to people who can given their permission to do so as per section 45(1) of the Act, and you must be able to disclose how and where this permission was given.  What many people don’t realize is that failure to adhere to the ECT makes you liable to prosecution!

When I receive spam emails from small South African companies, I’ve found a very simple solution.  I know that they often do it unintentionally or out of ignorance, so I’m not going to immediately report them! Rather, I send them a modified version of this ’spam reply’ I found: http://www.internet.org.za/spam_message.txt . I used this message twice this week and on both occasions, I quickly received an apology and my email address was removed.  I’ve found it to be a great way to educate companies about the ECT Act, have my email address removed from their lists, and I can do so without writing an aggressive reply!

[Ironically, as I finished writing this article, I received another spam email. I immediately blocked the sender without even looking past the subject line.]

Marcel Oudejans is a Corporate Infotainer who is passionate about inspiring his audiences to deliver more “magic moments” to their customers in their customer service, sales & marketing. Marcel is the author of “The Serious Business Owner’s Guide To Creating Customers For Life” & provides more tricks, techniques & strategies on his blog, http://www.performmarketing.co.za