Email Marketing Question -- Is This Spam? Options

[globallink]

I have a client that wants to send out an industry newsletter to a list of around 25K addresses. These are names he purchased within his industry.

Can anyone recommend an email marketing firm that can host the email list and send out the email? It seems some email companies are labeling this as spam.

The newsletter meets all guidelines and is legitimate. The only problem is he wants to send to people who have not personally given permission to receive it, but it will have an opt out link at the bottom.

Any ideas and recommendations?

Thank you.

This post has been edited by globallink: Sep 29 2006, 06:17 PM

[phaithful]

Typically email address are purchased legitimately. How effective those emails will be is usually a crap shoot. They are usually recycled so many times over that they are virtually worthless.

25k of email addresses isn't that much and a normal server can usually support it. If you don't feel comfortable sending them yourself, there are third parties like Cheetahmail and IntelliContact that you can send regular newsletters from.

The opt-out link is the first step. Make sure you fulfill all the CAN SPAM legal requirements and keep scrubbing those email lists.

Whether or not you are spamming is really dependent on where you got the email list. Many time people opt in by agreeing to T&Cs without reading them, and many state they can resell their email addresses. So most of the time it isn't spamming them, however, since they haven't explicitly double opted in for your newsletter, I'd say your open rate will be very low and your sign-up rate even lower.

Just don't exepct too much success.

This post has been edited by phaithful: Sep 29 2006, 07:58 PM