Because I work in the email marketing industry, I spend a lot of my day thinking about spam. It’s not really the happiest topic and it’s also not all penis pills or blatant phishing attempts. A lot of perceived spam out there seems to come down to a genuine disconnect between what we as people explicitly ask to hear about and what they as marketers think we want to hear about.

As someone who stands in the middle I’m often the arbiter of these disputes. I’m the person who puts the brakes on those attempts to send completely irrelevant information out to lists and who has to have those amazingly difficult conversations with people about how they may see it as being relevant and recognizable, but the people on their list may not. It’s tougher than it sounds.

After spending many, many hours looking at the issue and debating with end users over their attempts to send out emails that simply aren’t meaningful to their lists and their subscribers I’m starting to think that part of the problem is that feeling of ownership. If everyone would just take a step back and realize that these aren’t your lists, that these are human beings who may (or in some case may not but that’s another story) have asked to hear from you about a specific topic. That doesn’t give you ownership over that address. It doesn’t mean you can suddenly send them anything you want because they once upon a time expressed interest in your company or your product. You don’t own them.

Maybe it harkens to that distasteful area of list purchase and rental. Where you were “buying” addresses or “renting” their usage for a certain amount of time. Well those addresses certainly didn’t belong to the sellers either. Email addresses are not a commodity to be bartered and sold. Let’s stop thinking about them that way. Don’t think of a list as something you want to blast to. Think of it as having a conversation with people. You want that conversation to be relevant to what they asked for. You aren’t shouting into an empty room just hoping and praying someone, somewhere, is listening to you. Have some respect.

Part of my job involves talking to people about list permissions and it can often be a difficult conversation. When are you allowed to spa er contact your mailing list? Well the general rule of thumb should be if they’ve explicitly and directly *asked* you to contact them about that topic. And yes, I’m saying that should be the general rule no matter what, not just if you’re using the company I work for to send with.

A few things that doesn’t mean. It means you can’t say on a form “if you don’t want to hear from me click here” or say later “they can always just unsubscribe” and add them anyway. They need to explicitly opt-in first by checking a box saying something like “please add me to your mailing list” or explicitly asking you to add them to your list. You want everyone on your list to have explicitly asked to hear from you. Quality over quantity. The happier your subscribers are the more engaged they are. And the more engaged they are the more likely they are to click links, make purchases and walk away with a positive opinion about your company.

So just remember. Set the bar high for your opt-ins. Don’t try and add everyone and their cousin to your list. Make them ask to be added. Because if they truly want to hear from you…then they truly want to hear from you. Sure your list might be smaller than if you tried to add everyone you possibly could, but those are the people who truly want to hear what you’re saying.