I do feel that this was an abuse of my client information and also of my company name.

I would like ALL of SpaBoom's emails to be opt-in as opposed to automatic and have asked to have my account marked that way — I believe it's the accept defaults setting similar to the GC's… if this is correct, others may want to do the same.

Style of email does not match my business — would have liked option to edit if I could not opt-out. I only know the email content by opening a returned email.

At the very least make sure it's obvious that the email is from our wonderful website support and being sent on our behalf or can you do that as the client has trusted their personal information to me and my company and does not actually know/recognize/care that there is a third party that helps facilitate marketing.

Clients received this directly after receiving an email I developed which may seem excessive to some — to get a caring 'no pressure' relaxation reminder and then a 'prestige customer' verification request.

Also, I address marketing on my intake form: next to the space for the email address it asks 'May I contact you by mail/email' with a yes/no check box. If they check 'yes' they have opted-in… if I added them and they get an email from you/SpaBoom and they fail to respond, then I may lose this contact. I think it's the same for those that sign up for the newsletter online.

Now I'm going to have to work on letting my clients know that this was not my doing without sounding like I have so little control over my business communication/their personal information.

I would love to see SpaBoom work on the following:

Being able to sort customer information by birthday and create/send emails by this date. Being able to create repeating emails that are client specific would be great for b-days and anniversaries.

Those wonderful report graphs you mentioned November of 2007 — no, I didn't chime in for my support, but I am still looking forward to them!

An OPTIONAL review/testimonial request & page for actual service(s) provided. My GC purchasers have been sweet about reviewing the GC process, but you can tell that it seems odd…

Maintaining personal client contact/service. If you are able to identify bad email lists — contact those clients directly to help resolve the issue.

Continue keeping us/your clients informed. I love the blog and hope that you will also try to 'practice what you preach' in terms of client retention. That's what Bill is doing above and I appreciate it.

Please let me know what the impact of this action will be. Do I have to select 'send email mktg' for those that gave me permission to use their email but did not respond. By not responding have they negated previously given permission?

Sigh… thanks for creating a place for feedback and being receptive… I really need a massage right now…

We've made a big mistake, and caused a lot of problems. I'm deeply sorry for it.

WE WON'T EVER DO IT AGAIN.

We are working hard to make it up to you. Please contact me directly at any time, bill.bice@spaboom.com or 505/796-8396.

Bill Bice, CEO

Also, I have over 500 non-delivered bounces in my personal e-mail box now. I have to go through and delete each one.

Mother's Day is our number 2 revenue generator. If this bomb is not fixed and personal responses from tech support not received, I get solicitations from companies doing what SpaBoom does everyday. I will be investigating them further. I have been thrilled with SpaBoom up until this nightmare but this one could be a deal killer.

Like any other email campaign you have, we should have been notified and given the opportunity to correct/modify. I am tempted to remove all email addresses from my account so this DOES NOT HAPPEN AGAIN!

What is the procedure to make sure this does not happen again?

We've made — as a company — some mistakes here and I want to apologize to everyone for those mistakes. We definitely needed to give our customers more notice, we should have instituted a stronger opt-in process from the very beginning, and we should have given those of you who have been very diligent in keeping your emailing list up-to-date the ability to "opt-out" of our spring cleaning.

Please accept our apologies for these missteps.

We haven't "deleted" your email addresses or otherwise modified your emailing lists. Your data is still on SpaBoom, and it's your data — you can download it and use it elsewhere as you think appropriate and see fit. We're just trying to limit the emailing to email addresses of those we know have opted-in.

Here's the problem: Many of our customers have taken advantage of the newsletter feature SpaBoom provides, and many of our customers have added email addresses to their account for newsletter purposes. Unfortunately, some of these customers haven't been keeping their emailing lists up-to-date. Worse, a few haven't been very careful about whose email address they've added to their lists.

The net-net for us is, we've had to take some drastic steps to keep the email flowing. When one customer of ours has a bad email list, it impacts all of our customers. We had two options: Do nothing or take some drastic steps. If we did nothing, your email newsletters would simply not get out. Let me explain why this is such a problem:

When you send email (i.e. newsletters) in bulk, many Internet service providers have special computers that recognize the bulk email and immediately send it to the trash rather than deliver it. These same Internet service providers then examine where the bulk email came from, and depending on a number of factors, usually start blocking the systems that sent the bulk email. This means one bulk emailing from one customer can impact all customers. In other words, if one of our customers "sends SPAM," these systems just automatically assume all our customers send SPAM.

When this happens, it's confusing, since some folks get your newsletter and some don't. It's not clear of those who don't get it, what the reason is (i.e. did it go in their junk folder, or did they just not receive it?). Over time, if nothing is done, you'll find your newsletters are simply not being received or read.

Note that I've seen instances where a customer has a very small list (i.e. 300 email addresses) that they carefully maintain and even have proof of opt-in, yet someone in their email list still makes a SPAM complaint. This seems to happen when a couple shares an email account. One of them opts-in, and the other doesn't know about it and is all too quick to report something as SPAM.

So, we have a problem: We need to police all email lists on our network, so no customers are affected by the poor email practices of just one of our customers. Otherwise, the newsletter feature we provide will be ineffective.

This problem is only going to get worse, and we're working really hard on devising new methods, technology and procedures to address the SPAM issue. We want your feedback and comments. Please keep them coming, and again, I sincerely apologize for the issues we've created.

Thank you. Larry.

p.s. Before becoming a SpaBoom founder, I ran a web hosting company called FatCow Web Hosting. By the time we sold that business in 2005, it boasted over 32,000 customers. SPAM was our number one issue over there, and we spend hundreds-of-thousands of dollars trying to keep the email flowing and the SPAM out, and had a dedicated full-time person focused on SPAM issues. At SpaBoom, we're experiencing very similar issues to what I saw at FatCow.

Again, thanks for your efforts.

We send the email marketing campaigns from our email servers on your behalf, and in the last few months the volume generated had gotten to the point where some of the large ISPs (companies like AOL or Yahoo!, etc.) had partially or completely blocked emails from us, even if it had your "From:" address on the message. This was a huge problem, because not only were many of the emails simply not going out at all, all of the rest of them were viewed as suspect by many user's email clients.

We simply had to do something, or stop offering email marketing altogether. Our service is free, and part of the reason that Constant Contact and companies like it charge a fair amount for their services is because they have to constantly maintain huge arrays of email servers, create relationships with the big ISP companies to stay in their good graces, and essentially spend 100% of their time ONLY ensuring that emails get delivered. You might imagine the rock & hard place that a company like SpaBoom could get into when we offer a similar service as an adjunct to our primary activities.

None of this is to excuse the messiness of what happened — a small percentage of our clients did receive duplicate emails, but it truly was a very small percentage (disproportionate, I'm sure, to the response you've received as a result).

Now, some of you have concerns that can be addressed specifically for your business, and I will be in touch with you directly. We know that there are clients of ours who have carefully tailored their email distribution lists and ideally should not have been included in this event. Identifying which of our clients have great email lists compared to non-verified lists is coming too late in the process, mostly by you letting us know emphatically, "Hi! I have a good list! Don't truncate it!". And of course that is not the time-order that should occur.

We have considered the Spa Board idea in the past, and this might be a perfect "straw" to get that ball rolling. Thank you for reinforcing the thought that this would be a great step forward.

Thank you for reading, listening, and letting us know your reactions, and keep them coming. Really.

Maybe you should have a SpaBoom Customer (meaning us) review committee just to double check some of these things. Take a few of the outspoken, participating owners from the blogs that are active owners in their business and run some of this by them before you upset peoples databases?

Mine is so small because we just started with you all right before December it was a minor inconvenience to me. Most of my list is "purchasers" of gift certificates NOT clients — and there is a difference in marketing to these two customers.

A review committee is not a bad idea. You are on one side of the business and we are on the other — we can both benefit from new ideas and sharing information.

Also, someone should have properly edited for language errors, because, your SpaBoom clients were not one of those “– in the know about our goings-on.”

So now what? You have potentially turned my list of over 300+ clients into 10, 20, 30…maybe 40? People are busy and they don’t want to “verify” their email. They’ve already given it to me so why should they waste their time doing something they’ve already done? If anything, it angers people. You said “…Now that your clients have been asked to opt-in, only those that have actively indicated they want to hear from you in the future, will…” So I can no longer legally send them marketing emails now that you have gone over my head with your own email?

Your blog states that it went out to “imported” clients –- I have never “imported” any of my information into your system, yet all clients received this email. I have hand coded each one of these as I have gotten my clients permission over the years.

Also, your first post says this is something you will be doing on occasion. Your second post says it was a one-time deal… something that needed to be done “under the circumstances.” Can you please expand on what circumstances this needed to be done?

I am NOT a spammer. Why would you decrease everyone’s email lists? Marketing is so much of a numbers game and the people you have hurt the most is us, your SpaBoom clients. This should have been opt-in email for US, not our contacts. If you felt it necessary to purge your list, you should have sent all of us emails explaining why you felt it was needed. To do it without our consent is extremely disrespectful. We, as business owners, should make such an important decision about our marketing and as I said before, it should have been an opt-in for US, your CLIENTS. Not to mention, the email was very generic and I am not a “folk” -– I am a sole proprietor. This email makes my business look like I did not care enough to cater this message to my clients.

My email list is priceless, sacred, my “holy grail” if you will. I take every one of my contacts VERY seriously. I have worked very hard on a one-on-one basis to earn my client’s email addresses so that I can market to them. They trust me with it. They know that I will not spam it, sell it, or abuse it. I do not take it lightly that you took it upon yourself to contact them, acting like it was from me personally. I am embarrassed by the generic email, as well as left wondering what to do about all of my clients who have given me permission previously but now may not have gotten the email or just wasn’t in the mood to click a link.

The real question for me is why was this done??? Everyone knows that at the bottom of each marketing email there is a link that says ,“If you do not wish to receive messages from ___ any longer, please click here to opt-out.” Something doesn’t add up. I believe that we, all of SpaBoom’s clients, deserve a clearer explanation on this matter. I am personally shocked, offended and confused as to why you thought this would be a smart business move.

I truly hope my client's are not going through this because I'm sure every one of them will opt-out. What then?

Gina Loya
BodyWerks Spa

We did indeed send an email last night to any clients of yours marked as "send email marketing" and not marked "inactive". Those that do not click the link are excluded from future mailings (just check their client record to see that they are indeed, marked "pending").

Our timing was short, and that was an oversight — we posted on this blog about it on Tuesday, and sent an email about it on Wednesday before the big email went on Thursday night. I chose the wording to be casual and hopefully friendly — if it did not appeal to you, I'm the person to hear your feedback.

All of us considered this VERY carefully before sending out the email, but the reality is that many of the clients that are stored in our database had never been asked if they wanted to be included for potential mailings.

Because spam is such a huge issue, we elected to be good 'net citizens and ask everyone's permission, but as you can see, it is definitely messy in some of the fallout. Many of YOU are already doing good practices and have made sure that your clients are in fact legitimate customers, and you've been dinged inadvertently.

The great news is that if you had problems with bounced messages, those will fall off to nearly none. Now that your clients have been asked to opt-in, only those that have actively indicated they want to hear from you in the future, will.

This WAS a one-time deal and was necessary given the circumstances, but it still does not make it an easy process by any means.

I do apologize for any confusion or inconvenience. Please call if you have further concerns — I absolutely appreciate your response and comments. We work for you — lost business on your part only comes back to bite all of us, so we want to make sure that your Gift Certificate revenue continues to flow in the amazing way it already has.