May 4, 2007

Fellow Coaches, Imagine Waking Up To 1500 Emails Like I Did Today!

Filed under: Email Marketing — E. Alvin Davis @ 4:57 pm

That’s right, as Outlook retrieved today’s email, I was surprised to see I’d received 1500 emails!

Since then, 5 hours later, I’ve received another 500 emails!

When you think about this, what comes to mind?

Do you envision emails from prospective clients who want you to be their personal coach?

Do you imagine affiliate program notifications informing you a sale was made and you’ve earned some moolah?

Do you think of being contacted by the media and they want to “tell the world” about you, your coaching practice and the great results you’re getting for your clients?

Do you envision some organization wanting you to speak at their event — and pay you a handsome sum to do it?

Do you imagine one of your industry’s top organizations telling you you’ve been nominated for a prestigious award?

The truth is, it could have been any of these things … but it wasn’t.

Nope, today it wasn’t anything that exciting.

No, today it was 2000 (and counting!) emails that were sent by spammers using my email address, blocked by ISPs, and returned to me because they thought I was the sender.

Now, here’s the lesson for you.

I’ve had my own website since 1996. Back then we didn’t know what many of us know now, and that is …

Never, ever, ever display your email address on your (on anyone else’s website) unless you disguise it in some way (using java script, spelling it out as “name (AT) domain.com” or some other variation that can’t be scrapped by bots.

In case you don’t know, the “bad guys” comb the web with their bots looking for words that are placed between the @ sign and a domain extension (name@domain.com). When they find them, they know they’ve got an email address.

Not only are they likely to use your email address to spam you, they are also likely to cloak their email address and send out spam that appears to be from your domain name.

Now, if you have AOL or MSN or any other ISP email, that isn’t much of a problem.

It’s unlikely they’ll ban all email from aol.com or msn.com — but you, ah now that’s a different story.

There was a time when I couldn’t use my regular email address to send mail to anyone on AOL because they had me (that’s right, little ‘ol innocent me, as a spammer!)

And, as you might imagine, when you take out all of the AOL uses out of the equation, you eliminate a lot of people you can’t communicate with in the easiest, most natural manner.

Imagine if these people are on your coaching practice mailing list. All those names you’d worked so hard to acquire, now blocked and unavailable to your subscribers who wanted to hear from you.

Now, if it’s your own domain name that gets flagged as a spammer, then that’s really a problem.

For example, my case …

Essentially, my first name is my domain name, so I’m reluctant to want to change email addresses (plus, if truth be know, it’s pretty cool to tell someone my email is “me@me.com”).

So, hopefully you’ll learn from my mistake.

No using your email address on your website, or in a coaching forum, or on Craigslist, eBay or anywhere!

Got it? (BTW, in the time it took to write this post I’ve received another 300 returned emails. Yikes!)

Guard that email address like, well like it’s your life, OK?

‘Cause it is! — and I don’t want you to spend your beautiful Friday afternoon deleting spam emails like someone we know.