Email marketing service without "unsubscribe" link requirement?

Question

There are a lot of email marketing services out there, like Constant Contact and MailChimp, for sending out marketing emails.

My company produces emails for other businesses, and we use services such as these for sending them to a large group of recipients.

Virtually all of these services require an "unsubscribe" link be present in the emails. OK, I understand that for emails destined to the general public. But sometimes, companies want us to produce and send emails for internal company use only. Obviously, they don't desire an extraneous unsubscribe link at the bottom of their internal emails.

Does anyone know of such a service that will send emails without requiring the unsubscribe link? (I still want the service to have the feature, as obviously all the public-bound emails should have it. We just need a nice way to send "internal" emails without them).

Answer 1

I ran into this problem a few years back as well when needing to send bulk email to my client's internal audience, for which unsubscribe was neither required nor appropriate.

Ended up with Relevant Tools - http://www.relevanttools.com - as they were willing to remove the requirement after speaking with me, and doing a check into the background of the agency I work for.

We've never abused their service, so they continue to offer complete control over the content of our emails.

Best of luck.

Answer 2

I know this thread is now dead, but I would like to add to it, as I frequently encounter the exact same problem and am presently trying to persuade my hosting service that bulk mailings coming from my web applications have no legal obligation to include an unsubscribe link. My sites register employees for company conferences and have to send out invitations etc in bulk.

Unfortunately, law here in the UK seems hazy, but in the US it's quite clear that you don't require an unsubscribe link on "transactional" email. What constitutes that can be a grey area though. There's a very clear article here - http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business - on US law pertaining to this. In short, the Can-Spam Act doesn't apply to transactional or relationship contact, which is defined as facilitating an already agreed-upon transaction or updating a customer about an ongoing transaction.

So, contrary to harrymc's opinion, a mass mailer doesn't in fact have legal obligations for an unsubscribe link to be included in transactional mass mailing. Persuading one of that is another matter, of course.

Answer 3

You could probably run your own mailing list software on your own server- iirc gnu mailman uses a web interface for management and other than that is pretty much transparent.

Answer 4

If you want to run your own mass mailing server/app that gives you full control over the content of the email (including whether you have Unsubscribe links), have a look at OpenEmm.

"OpenEMM is a feature-rich enterprise software for e-mail marketing, newsletters and service mails (transaction mails and event or time triggered mails). OpenEMM offers sophisticated bounce management, link tracking, lots of realtime statistics, a CMS module and a scripting feature to implement individual tasks.

OpenEMM is the first open source application for e-mail marketing. Its code base has been developed since 1999 and is used (as part of the commercial ASP product E-Marketing Manager) by companies like IBM, Siemens, Click&Buy and Deutsche Telekom."

Answer 5

You could use a desktop solution like our GroupMail. This way, you are in complete control of your message components, delivery and list management.

Answer 6

A mass mailer service wouldn't agree to omit the Unsubscribe link, because of legal obligations. In the USA, for example, they would risk a fine of $11,000 per each mail!

You would either need to find a not-so-legal mailer (I don't know of any), set up your own mailer, or perhaps make the Unsubscribe link as unnoticeable as possible (small letters, similar color to the background, etc.).