OPT IN VS SPAM

Opt In Email Marketing
With privacy a concern of the new marketing age you have to be careful on who you market your advertisement to and how you go about doing so. Opt In marketing is soliciting persons whom have granted permission to a company, person, network or other to receive information or offers from such entity at some point in time, a person is Opted In is when they pass their private information such as name, address, phone number and email address to an entity and acknowledges that they are allowing that entity to pass information to that person. With bulk mailing and spam on the rise you want to be sure when using electronic forms of marketing that you are marketing to Opt In subscribers. Using email marketing can cut cost; allow instant responses as well as measuring effectiveness of each offer or advertisement that is sent. Using Opt In emails to market your company or service is an effective and efficient way to get your offers in front of millions of interested buyers/ future clients for a fraction of the cost of any other form of marketing.

SPAM
Spam is the common reference to unsolicited bulk electronic messages, usually electronic mail messages but increasingly SMS messages (text messages delivered to mobile phones), that are transmitted to a large number of recipients who have not requested those messages. They are usually - but not necessarily – commercial in nature; i.e., they generally promote or sell products or services. The bulk of SPAM messages also share one or more of the following characteristics:

- They are sent in a largely untargeted and indiscriminate manner, often by automated means;
- They include or promote illegal or offensive content;
- Their purpose is fraudulent or otherwise deceptive;
- They could collect personal information in breach of the National Privacy Principles (the recent extensions of the Privacy Act to business);
- They are sent in a manner that disguises the originator; eg, from an Internet address other than that shown in the message as received, often involving the unauthorised use of an innocent third party's e-mail server; and
- They do not offer a working address to which recipients may send messages opting-out of receiving further unsolicited messages. While such characteristics are not essential to whether a message should be regarded as "unsolicited" or sent in "bulk", most commentators would probably not regard as SPAM direct marketing communications with all the following characteristics:

1. They do not include promote or include illegal content;
2. They are not deceptive in any way that would breach common law or statute law;
3. They do not collect or use personal information in breach of the National Privacy Principles; and
4. They are sent to recipients who have dealt voluntarily with the sender before and, on the basis of that existing relationship, can reasonably be assumed by the sender as prepared to accept messages of the type being sent (ie, the messages would not be unexpected).