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Andy Sernovitz | Damn, I Wish I\'d Thought of That!
Damn, I Wish I\'d Thought of That! – Andy Sernovitz Blog – Unusually Useful Ideas for Smart Marketers. A great, practical blog that will help you use word of mouth marketing, social media, viral marketing, blogs, buzz, evangelism, and more.
Do you rent or sell the email addresses of your customers? Probably not. But people probably think that you do.
Be explicit. Tell people that you won’t give out their email. Do it right next to your email subscribe form.
Ours says "We will never release your email address, ever. You can unsubscribe at any time."
Your opt-in rate will grow instantly.
(Oh, yeah .. check out our new email newsletters!)
Make it a word document instead of a PDF. PDFs can’t be quoted on a blog or pasted into an email.
If the purpose of a white paper is to get exposure to new customers — do everything you can to make it easy to share.
Didn’t consider this before!
PDFs *can* be quoted, although perhaps most people don’t know how to copy text from them (look for the Select tool in the toolbar). It is possible to disable this feature, though most PDFs aren’t protected that way.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Reader/8.0/help.html?content=WS58a04a822e3e50102bd615109794195ff-7ee5.html
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Andy,
today’s post is so simple yet so many companies and bloggers still do not make it extremely obvious that, as you say, “We will never release your email address, ever. You can unsubscribe at any time.” If I have to search for this info, I usually just do not provide my e-mail. These are two simple rules to live by.
Hopefully you will convince more people to add this simple phrase where it can be easily found.
@dmgerbino
Great tip, and so rarely adopted, as David Gerbino says.