Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Visualize their reaction upon receiving your direct mailer or especially unsolicited email trying to sell them something. Some people do tend to react badly to direct mailers which contain even their very basic particulars, viewing this as an infringement of their privacy. Wile I do not react too badly to "junk mail", I feel bad that many trees are sacrificed for this purpose!

Due to the more rampant abuse of email marketing, an "ethics barometer" is much required by the fraternity.

You need to build your copy with a permission-based "option-in" feature which enables willing parties to join your promotion/ campaign. I have given it a name - "The Direct Marketing Essential Ethics Barometer ".

Serious internet marketers adopt this marketing approach very stringently lest the internet marketer is mistaken for a spammer. The process is such - you lead generate a potential customer by giving away free information or a free gift, but on the pretext (and genuinely so) that you need their permission and verification via their email. After obtaining their email, your very intelligent auto-responder will send a confirmation email to the prospect. The prospect logs into the email account and clicks the confirmation link. The link brings the prospect to a site to download the promised free info or gift.

With the opt-in email address, a touch point is successfully and legitimately created for you, the marketer, to continue connecting with the prospect until he or she buys something from you.

And of course, those who are not keen to participate can choose to ignore the mailer or your first marketing email.

This also serves as an effective tracking system for respond rate as your auto-responder should have comprehensive performance tracking analytics. You can then tweak your campaign accordingly for better response results.