I am trying to self-teach myself (through watching a lot of YouTube videos) how to do email marketing because as a pianist, composer, arranger, writer, and also the co-founder of Celebration of Joy, Inc. (a non-profit founded in 2014), I realize that good email marketing practices can draw a lot of web traffic as well as email traffic to your domain email name, and create a major boost to your resume.
But I realize that bad email marketing practices, especially when you send emails in bulk, can get one in trouble. Sometimes big trouble in a way that you could be shut down email-wise, criminally and/or civilly fined, and/or be put into the slammer. You could run afoul of the anti-spam laws like CAN-SPAM from the USA (or the "Control and Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing") or CASL from Canada (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation).
I realize that such bad practices can lead to mild to extremely painful legal implications and consequences--ranging from being warned of permanent shutdown of your email account from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or ESP (Email Service Provider)--all the way to having your email business or account shut down temporarily or permanently by anti-spam blacklists---all the way to having a knock on the door by an FBI agent and then you are taken away in handcuffs and sent to jail for all of this.
When you are flagged as a spammer, and already have a third-party bulk email marketing service that you use (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Mad Mimi, etc.), and you do not do good practices to mitigate these accusations ro avoid being flagged in the future (aka "reported"), it can cause severe damage to you as a email marketer.
With this, I classify these implications and consequences into three categories...
1. Mild Penalties
2. Moderate Penalties
3. Severe Penalties
MILD PENALTIES
1. The ESP will email your with a warning that you will be sanctioned on your email account for bad marketing practices, which usually a shut down of your email temporarily without being on an email blacklist, most often through a suspension of your email account, if you continue spamming.
2. Often, the recipients will warn you individually that you emailed them with the intent to spam them---and often they will report you as such and say that they will take further action on you if you continue to email them without asking first.
3. The ESP will probably drop your email reputation score 5-10 points.
Often, you will get these penalties for........
1. Several or more incidences of hard bounces, but not too much.
2. Lots of soft bounces.
3. Several incidences of low open rates or high bounce rates on your email campaigns.
MODERATE PENALTIES
1. The ESP can temporarily stop you from sending mass emails or email blasts if you send emails in bulk, especially if you do that using bad email lists (they will usually have very bad SPFs--sender profile formats) or lists from people that you did not get consent by them to send the emails if you do this in bulk. Usually from 7 days to up to 28 days.
2. The ESP can drop your email sender score (or reputation score) about 30-40 points.
2. The ISP on your own website could place your IP address on a red-flag and you may get a warning from any of the anti-spam companies (after being informed that the IP address was flagged) that if you do not change your practices for the better, they will blacklist you.
Often, you will get these penalties for...
1. A moderate amount of hard bounces and not doing everything you can to cut back on them on your email campaigns.
2. Doing email blasts or email bulk sends with outdated email addresses.
3. Sending blasts to 500-1000 recipients where a lot of these email addresses are spoofed or had been red-flagged in the past as emails coming from known spammers.
SEVERE PENALTIES
1. Spamhaus, Barracuda, and other similar DBLs (Domain Block Lists, also known as anti-spam blacklists) can put a domain email
address - or even worse - a domain IP address - on a blacklist or two for serious spam violations you do. You get a 100 percent shot of being blacklisted for repeat serious spam violations. If that happens ("blacklisted"), you cannot send email at all, or even use your website at all. Any email that you send when you are blacklisted will head straight to the junk folder or your recipient's spam box--all the time!--even if the emails are lawful to send and even if you have permission from the recipients to send it---Every time. When you try to open up your own website, you realize that you got blocked and you cannot open the site.
I am imagining a lot of online email marketers and businesses who ended up bankrupt or disbanded or even homeless when they get blacklisted by DBLs. Trying to get off a blacklist so you can do email again is not easy for most of the DBLs that you face. In most cases you have to petition the DBL or DBLs that you were accountable for the violations and you are doing better practices--this is the only way usually to get yourself off a blacklist. But in some DBLs, it is not guaranteed if you try to get yourself off one.
(Blacklisting is one of the several legal remedies under CAN-SPAM.)
2. Authorities like the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) will send you mail that you will not like at all and extremely abhor--a notice that you
are going to have to pay a very heavy fine---$16,000, for each violation of the CAN-SPAM act. Also known as a summons. If you are a Canadian business owner who uses email marketing and you seriously violate CASL, expect bad news from the Canadian authorities when you get a civil summons that requires you to pay up to a maximum $10,000,000 fine in Canadian dollars for violating that law. I don't know about some of the other ways other countries punish with their anti-spam laws but I do have a bit of a hunch that the consequences are going to be similarly or near-similarly strong.
3. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) also can be involved--as well as the FTC, and you will get an arrest warrant and you have days to turn yourself in to police for serious spam violations. You may even get a summons to appear in criminal court without being arrested, but still, being summoned by the FBI is extremely serious. You get convicted criminally as a spammer on a violation that will send you to federal prison, and you will have a stain on your rap sheet especially after you get out of federal prison. A felony conviction will mean that employers will see this as public record--such criminal records are going to be difficult to efface or expunge--and that means most of these employers might disqualify you from the job that you love or desire--even if it is not a security-sensitive job---through all of those pre-employment background checks that are commonly done by employers.
4. Finally, the email reputation score will certainly go down 70 to 80 points, maybe even up to 90 points, so you get something like a reputation score of 5 to 10, or 1 to 5, or even 0. If your sender score goes down to 0, it is like getting the lowest point on a grade of F in college. It can ruin your future or even your life!
Your reputation score in your domain email address is a bit like your FICO credit score. 90-100 is a great sender score, 80-89 is good, 70-79 is average, 60-69 is fair, and 59 or lower is poor.
You get these penalties by a lot of these "no-no" practices that are really against the law, but here are some of them...
1. Using dictionary attacks by way of an automated program to steal these email addresses (and even their passwords) in order to make your email lists.
2. Harvesting thousands of email addresses from unclean lists in order to build your email lists.
3. Harvesting email addresses without telling those recipients how you got these email addresses in order to build your
email lists.
4. Excessive incidences of not honoring opt-outs or unsubscribes in your email campaigns.
5. A master load of incidences of hard bounces on your email campaigns and not doing good-faith methods to keep these hard
bounces low.
HOW TO KEEP YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS FROM RUNNING AFOUL OF THE ANTI-SPAM LAWS
Well, basically, I found out that the CAN-SPAM law is a good way to go for me to help me follow the anti-spam rules. Most of the requirements in this anti-spam law I can get.......
1. You cannot lie in the subject line. That is, your subject heading in the line has to correlate to the email body message that relates to it. If not, you are in trouble.
2. You cannot use a deceptive email address.
Generally you steer away from trouble if you make an email address from a reputable ESP like Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, or Google (or Gmail) which require you to make a username and password for your made
email address. Then those ESPs do several required protocols (DKIM, DNS Feedback loops, reverse DNS lookup, etc.) to make sure that the email address IS the email address that you send to recipients--that is, a real email address, not an unreal one.
3. To avoid the risk of recipients opening up pornography where they are not allowed to be shown such, CAN-SPAM requires that emails that do have pornography have "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" in caps and in quotation marks--in the subject line.
4. If the email is promotional, the law requires that such emails are an advertisement. At the end of the email, you should say something like this....
"This is an advertisement from (name of company)."
This is a simple way to do it but there are variations on how you can do it.
5. Promotional emails require that you have a physical website that you can be reached (and an email address), or a physical address.
Then there are the more tricky parts of the law.
6. You need to have express permission from the email recipient or recipients to send promotional emails to the recipient or recipients.
I realize that it is hard to do this manually, and the best way out of this is to use a third-party email service that will do a double opt-in process (common now for permission-based email), such as Constant Contact, MNB (Mail Newsletter Builder), or MailChimp. They will have protocols that will do the permissions for you so that the recipients can sign up for your email lists. Double opt-in is where those third-party email services do a background check on those email addresses who want to subscribe with permission to see if they are fake, scam, or deceptive addresses before the emails go through to finish the permission process. If the email addresses are bad, those third parties automatically jettison such emails off the list ASAP.
7. You need to tell the email recipient or recipients a way to opt-out of your emails. (In other words, "unsubscribe'.)
This is probably easier to do under CAN-SPAM than trying to get permission from the recipients. Opt-out means that the recipient decides to not want any more emails from you. That's basically it. I could do this sentence in my email campaigns, like so:
If you at anytime you want to opt-out or unsubscribe from this email list, you can contact me directly through email and I will get you off the list in 6 hours."
I understand that under this section of the law, the opt-out needs to work for 30 days. Third-party email services often do this for me more easily than I can do on my own.
But to make sure that I honor the opt-outs, I can write down something like my own email blacklist....a list of email addresses of recipients who want to opt-out so I do not accidentally send these emails to them again.
Anti-spam laws, especially CAN-SPAM and also CASL, are not going to be easy for me. I know these laws are very serious business and I need to follow them.
Do you have any other pointers on how I can be a better email marketer? Please put on the comments below.
Thanks.
