Terra Marketing Group Takes A Stand Against Spam

Terra Marketing Group today urged Internet marketing companies to stop using spam and other deceptive email practices to try to gain market share.

The Canadian Internet marketing company is known for finding holes in existing marketplaces, improving the products and services being offered and then gaining a dominant position in the marketplace. This strategy has helped them grow from a small startup in November 2009 into a large company with more than 250 employees today.

Officials from Terra Marketing Group said the secret to their success is that they have always been dedicated to ethical business practices. But, they feel it is just as important for other companies to behave honestly; otherwise people will lose confidence in the online marketing industry, which will hurt everyone involved. Terra Marketing Group said that email ethics are particularly important, since people use email more often than any other online activity. However, it is also the one that is most often abused.

Spam emails do more to erode confidence in online shopping than any other deceptive practice. As such, they issued what they consider a set of guidelines for email promotions.
Firstly, only send emails to people who have agreed to be contacted by your company. You should always give them a way to opt out of your messages, and you should never sell your list to third parties because you have no way of knowing if they will behave ethically.
Secondly, emails should not be sent too often; otherwise they will get ignored or go to people's spam basket. Thirdly, it should be very clear where exactly an email is coming from. It's easy to mask your sending address, but that will destroy consumer confidence. Finally, your subjects and headlines should always honestly reflect what is in the body of the email. They concede that an exciting subject or headline can get people to open and read your email, but note that if people don't see what they expected to see, they will just trash it and, more likely than not, never open one of your emails again.

Terra Marketing Group said that they feel if everyone in the Internet marketing industry stuck to these very basic standards that sales, confidence and profits would skyrocket for everyone involved. If not, they said, email marketing may eventually cease to be a way to generate sales without expensive online advertising.