Take this little quiz to see whether your e-mail program is likely to be viewed as spam by its recipients.

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Spam (also known as UCE, or "unsolicited commercial e-mail") is any e-mail message that an organization sends to a distribution list of recipients without their express consent. Now, this is where things become a little murky, because there's no legal definition as to what constitutes consent.

The narrowest definition of consent would permit sending e-mail only to individual recipients who have specifically given their consent by proactively "opting in," or subscribing, to that distribution list.

However, many marketers extend this definition to include all customers with whom an organization has a business relationship (for example, based on their purchase history) even though the company has not received specific permission to send unsolicited e-mail to those customers.

Some marketers go further still, assuming that anyone who has expressed an interest in a somewhat related product, service, or area of interest and has provided his or her e-mail address at an affiliated Web site is a suitable candidate for e-mail bombardment. At its most extreme are those marketers who believe that anyone with an e-mail address is fair game!

If you annoy your customers, you will not be successful in building a valuable relationship with them.

It's really as simple as that. In practice, this means that you should do everything within your power to ensure that you only send your customers (or prospects) e-mail that will be of real value to them.

As a matter of courtesy, remind the recipients, within the message itself, why they are getting this message from you. It might be because they subscribed to your weekly e-mail newsletter, or because they recently registered (and provided their e-mail address) at your Web site.

Think you've got it? Take this little quiz to see whether your e-mail program is likely to be viewed as spam by its recipients.
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