Bulk email marketing or sending bulk emails is a method of direct marketing that has been practiced on the net ever since its inception. Another group of marketers that have used this method to send bulk emails is the spammer community. These are an infamous group of people who send unsolicited email to any valid email address that exists in the hope that these mails lead to a sale for the companies they represent. Spammers use ingenious and nefarious methods to get email addresses and send those emails. Getting email addresses is similar to getting an unlimited budget for their operations. Spammers acquire email addresses by using software that scours the net for any place that someone might have dropped an email address. In addition to this, spammers may also fraudulently send mailers, which con users to give up their mail IDs. Another method is to spam various combinations of mail IDs that are part of one domain and then by trial and error, eliminate the addresses that are sent back as bounced emails, leaving the rest as valid addresses to spam. Probably the worst type of fraudulent acquisition is asking someone to enroll in an anti-spam list only to end up being the victim of more spam.
Bulk email marketing done at a professional level must therefore try to harvest email addresses in a more professional way before sending bulk emails. It is also necessary since many countries outlaw spammers that use email addresses harvested from means like spider software that scours the net for mail IDs. The best way therefore to increase the number of email IDs in a database is to start combining forces with bigger entities on the net.
One of these entities could be social networking sites with their millions of customers and patrons. While these sites may not allow you to actually harvest an email address, they can allow you to send bulk emails from the internal mailing functionalities. This will only require the creation of a webpage and regular mails and notifications. Many of these social networking sites also have provisions for ecommerce.
Other methods of harvesting email addresses could be to tie up with offline entities. This is a common method that is sometimes used for example in the banking industry. Imagine that there is no more a trusted source than one's bank; therefore, leveraging that brand loyalty will enable you to reach a nearly captive audience.
There are many permutations and combinations of methods you can use in bulk email marketing to harvest email addresses with resorting to the methods of spammers. Remember to always follow the US CAN SPAM guidelines whenever sending bulk emails and to ensure that the recipients that you send bulk emails to always opt-in to receive updates from you.
