Is Address Harvesting Ethical?
Well you know that my first answer to this question is NO. Never is it okay, ethical nor legal to harvest emails out there. This company Jigsaw has been on my radar for a long time as they provide a contact info trading service for sales people. And this new email has a new download that actually allows you to grab emails from web sites and add them to your contact list. Meets the goals of Jigsaw from a business plan perspective, but man such a poor goal.
Why not just take advantage of the emails we get each day offering 100K emails for $5. Right?
Keep reading after the JUMP
This brings me to a conversation of the Email Insiders this past week that focused on an email sent by a Portland company that was a prospecting email. Now IMHO this is okay when you actually type the whole thing yourself and send it from your email client (NOT ESP) to people that have asked for information. Not those in which you grabbed a contact list and cold call/prospect using an email platform.
The double edged sword of this was that many on the list were saying how unethical it was to actually email people that you don’t know.. guys this is sales. Sales is about finding new opportunities, starting a conversation and moving them to lead to prospect to sale. Done the right way of course. But I could not believe to the degree that they were taking this. I can tell you that everyone of the companies complaining about this topic have a sales team that is emailing new prospects everyday. I know that they are doing it the right way (at least I assume that) but there is no way that sales people just sit back and wait for the leads to pour in and they react. Business does not work like that.
Take the high road in the end and do the following:
1. Learn who the prospect is
2. Call them
3. Engage in a conversation
4. Ask them if you can follow up by email to send them the information or recap the conversation.
5. Allow them to opt in for other ESP driven materials on their own.
6. Follow up with personal calls and emails
7. Book Em Danno.
Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.