One of my more favorite online authors to watch and read their blog entries is Seth Godin. Not to mention I’ve read most of his books. Recently he wrote a post about having your email address on your website entitled Promiscuous dispersal of your email address. I always like Mr. Godin’s posts, and I can definitely see where he’s coming from in this post. He’s essentially in my opinion saying that if you are a sales person (and your website is the best sales person at your company or should be), that you should make it as easy as possible for visitors to contact you. This would include posting your email address on your publicly accessible website for all to see regardless of the consequences with the spam overlords.
But are there any situations were you actually should protect your email address?
In my own humble opinion I don’t think that every situation is so cut and dry. Each business, each website, each situation, really needs careful consideration over topics such as this. I find many decisions are made quickly, and while something such as this isn’t probably the most important decision, quick decisions sometimes result in the incorrect decision.
So what are the possibilities where not having your email addresses splashed on your website so that any roaming spam bot could pick it up would be beneficial? It was mentioned that it needs to be very easy for someone to be able to contact you. I’m not exactly a marketing person, but I have read up on many articles from such people. I have heard it said that in some situations it can actually be beneficial to make it a little more difficult for people to make contact or even purchase from you. I believe in this scenario that it would result in higher qualified customers. If a visitor has to jump through a hoop or two, then by the time they do make contact with you they must be a pretty serious or motivated buyer.
Okay, but come on, especially at the time of this writing who has so much business and is so busy that they want to make it difficult for visitors so that they really only have to deal with the motivated buyers? There are other aspects to consider as well. In some cases a web form is better for visitors than an email link. In the case of an email link a reference to “mailto:” is used, this link will automatically bring up the visitors local email client and create a new email. What if they don’t have a local email client? Some visitors may use Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail for their email. What if they are using a friends computer, or maybe even sitting at a coffee shop on a computer?
In these few situations it’s obvious that if you have an email link you should also have a form as well or again you are alienating visitors. So in the end there is not a lot of reason to not have a email link on your website, except just to fight the spam. Having your email address on a website will drastically increase your spam. I’m not saying that Mr. Godin is wrong in anyway, but it is a heafty decision. Is a form really enough? Is potentially getting 100’s of spam emails a day really worth it? Could you put a little more effort into the form itself to make it more friendly for visitors to submit email?
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