When you hear any of these phrases: “electronic marketing”,3 Key Strategies to Ensure your Messages are not Perceived as Spam Articles “email marketing”, “sms marketing” or “bulk messaging” do you immediately think “Spam”?

Or do you think “courteously keeping in touch with your clients and customers, in a value-adding way, leading to long term satisfied SMS marketing clients”?

Let’s imagine for a moment the business you represent regularly communicating with your client base whereby:

valuable information is SMS tools provided
including news and special offers that are appropriate and useful
there’s an occasional snippet of humour for some light relief
the messages are sent at the right regularity, acting as gentle reminders for important things
your contacts look forward to receiving the messages
they can be dealt with at a convenient time
are easy to file away for future use,
easy to send onto a friend or colleague when appropriate
over the long term, your contacts are educated and helped to do business more easily with you
your contacts wont forget who you are, and feel that they know you and your business very well
Wouldn’t that be brilliant!?

Of course, you can achieve similar with printed material, or telephone calls, but these communication modes are much more costly.

Today I’m going to assume that we are all in agreement that electronic marketing is:

time and cost effective
essential for the way we conduct our business and communicate today
is a highly interactive medium, that can be used to virally and exponentially expand the reach of your business
(all topics for their own article!)

So back to my original question on who thinks “Spam” when they heaar phrases like email marketing and sms marketing [to which most of the room nodded spontaneously].

As part of developing the specification for, and building eNudge, I conducted extensive research on the Australian Spam Act 2003 and anti-spam legislation from a number of other countries. Whilst the Australian Spam Act has a definition of what Spam is, I believe that the most important thing for businesses is to ensure that people receiving your messages don’t perceive them to be Spam. None of us want the negative impact on our business or organisation of having our contacts thinking that we are spamming them! Whether or not we are according to the letter of the law.