Adding Offline Contacts to Your Mailing List

February 10, 2007 | By Gobala Krishnan |

If someone hands you their namecard offline, does it mean that they are giving you permission to add their name and email address to your mailing list?

NO.

That’s something people get wrong most of the time. Just because someone gives you their name card it does not mean that you can add them to your mailing list or autoresponder.

Here’s what Justin Premrick wrote on the Aweber blog:

There’s a difference between providing contact information to be subscribed to a newsletter and say, providing it so that I can call you back about setting up a meeting. And there are a whole lot of reasons in between.

So lets explore a few situations when it would be ok to add an offline contact to your mailing list, and when doing so is not only wrong, but is also considered spam.

Someone casually passed his namecard to you at a seminar - Not OK
Someone you met an an event liked what your business is about - Not OK
Someone passed you his namecard and aksed you to send him more information about your business - OK
You call or email the person who gave you his namecard, and got his permission to be included in your mailing list - OK
You distribute an “attendence sheet” during an event for attendees - Not OK, but arguable
You distribute a “join our mailing list” sheet during and event for attendees - OK
You bought a “database” of a few thousand names - Not OK

You can get a list of other do’s and don’t here.

In “permission based” email marketing, you need to:

Get permission form the user to send him commercial information - called “Opt-in”
Provide means for that person to stop receiving emails without having to ask you to do it - called “Opt-out”

If you don’t do all that, you’re basically spamming.

Do it right, and the easiest way is to get an Aweber autoresponder. They have very good reports on spam complaints and a very good opt-in / opt-out.