Mainstream Marketing Email Advice Needed
 

As those of you who are intimately involved with my life know, I own a unique mainstream SaaS site that caters to a very specific group of municipal clientele. My biggest problem is my lack of marketing reach. If I had extra pesos, there are a couple of industry specific magazines I could advertise in, but that option is currently off the table.

Here's the deal: I am able to data mine email addresses to a good number of potential customers. Any email I would send would be a one-off sales pitch. Period. I wouldn't keep spamming them. Is that sort of thing still considered a violation of the CAN-SPAM act? People say that you shouldn't send emails to anyone who has not specifically subscribed to your mailing list, yet from what I'm reading, the law only states that there must be a clear and simple way to unsubscribe from future mailings.

My secondary fear is this: Would an unsolicited marketing email put them off my product and make me seem shady?

To me, the answer to each is Yes & Yes, but the odds Joe Blow Pothole Manager would report you for spamming are slim, as are the odds he/she/it would get offended.

While I was building my that site, I met a lot of my potential customers through the job I was doing at the time. I have to tell, you they are not bright people. I doubt they would know what to do even if they knew there is a law in place. Some of them are very good at their job. Some of them are completely incompetent and it would piss me off that they were making so much money. Fucking politics. |catfight|