What do I do?

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cuisine posted on 04-08-2009 1:43 PM

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I need some help, I started a catering company two months ago, and as a marketing strategy i sent out emails advertising my company. I sourced these email adress from any source I could get hold of, from the yellow pages to the dstv guide.

I received areply from one of those email adress where the guy informed me that it was illegal to send out unsolicitated emails-as i was unaware that it was a crime. so now I stopped sending out emails and apologised to the guy, but now he ants me to tell him the source of where i got his email adress from- honestly i do not know as I had so many sources. now h says he will take necessary steps against me.

Is there anything I can do to protect myself?

Luis Marques

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Cordell replied on 04-15-2009 2:06 PM

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Hey Luis

First of all don't panic - you didn't mess up that much. According to the current South African Legislation you have not done anything that you can be sued for (provided that you have now removed him from your list and do not mail him again - the international laws are more strict and can result in heavy fines if you get a lot of complaints). The only steps he can take against you is to send in a SPAM complaint, and this will only be taken seriously if he is not the only person complaining against you. However, as you have discovered unsolicited commercial mailing gives a bad impression of your company, it would have been better to call up these companies and ask if you can send them more information on your company. You would have gotten a better response this way.

What should you do when someone complains about your email campaign:

Tell them where you acquired their details. In your case as I understand it, you manually did research on businesses that you thought might be interested in your product (using the phone book, magazines etc). Tell him that this is how you got his details. What's important here is that you did not buy a database from someone else.
Remove them from your list. And inform them that they have been removed.
Review the database that you were sending to. Email marketing is a relationship building tool and a method of staying top of mind with your contacts. If the contacts on your list have never heard of you before then they are bad contacts. Sending campaigns to them will only damage their image of your company, and you may land in trouble if you do this on a large scale.
Correct your strategy. There are many legitimate ways to generate a database but you need to be smart about it. What you want is a database of people who want to hear from you and are expecting your email every month. Ask yourself the following: What value will your email newsletter provide to it's reader (something funny, interesting, educational). How can you tell a receptive audience about your great newsletter (a competition, getting referals from your previous clients, sending targeted traffic to your website with Google Adwords etc). Have a look at one of our clients "The Fresh Earth Food Store" for a good example of how to use a contact form on your website and how to provide value in your monthly emailer, see: www.freshearth.co.za

More on SPAM laws and legal implications of bulk emailing:

http://www.touchbasepro.com/community/wikis/email_marketing_articles/email-marketing-international-laws-amp-south-african-legislation.aspx

http://www.touchbasepro.com/community/wikis/email_marketing_articles/who-can-i-send-to.aspx

http://www.touchbasepro.com/community/wikis/email_marketing_articles/the-legal-evolution-of-email-marketing.aspx