Articles and Tips

Getting opt-in permission offline

Professional trade show presenter Heidi Miller based an episode of her “Diary of a Shameless Self Promoter” podcast around the concept of email newsletters and spam. Heidi, who collects a lot of business cards through her work, had mentioned previously that she was considering taking email addresses from those cards and signing them up to her newsletter.

Several callers to her show suggested (correctly) that without explicit permission from those contacts, subscribing them to her list could be considered spamming. One of the callers described a great method to handle this specific situation. When she meets people, she specifically asks them if they would like to receive her email newsletter. If they say yes, she has them write ‘Yes to Newsletter’ on the back of their business card. Conversely, if they say no, she notes that on the card instead.

That way, when she processes the new contacts after a convention or show, she has a clear indication of who has opted-in and who has not. Nobody is accidentally subscribed and she always has the original permission to refer to. If you deal with a lot of offline permission situations, you might consider adapting this to your situation and put it into use.

When you add new subscribers to Campaign Monitor, our anti-spam policy requires that you have clearly explained that you will be contacting them by email. This technique could be part of a good permission management process.