Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

The other day, I got THREE: count ’em, THREE! emails from consignment, resale and thrift shops which

threw my privacy to the wind.

That’s right. They sent every email address they had, to everyone on their list. It’s bad enough that their competitor could easily grab these addresses up for their own marketing purposes, but more than that, they were

mishandling the trust their clientele had in them.

And adding to the spam in the world.

If you are using email as a marketing tactic for your shop, you need to do it professionally. And an email like this:

Names whitened out to protect… you guessed it… privacy.

shows every one of those 498 email addresses to anyone who cares to look. See?

Now, there’s a simple solution. Instead of using the CC field to put your trusting clients’ addresses in, just use the BCC field when sending these types of emails out. BCC stands for “Blind Carbon Copy”, a quaint terminology that simply means that

no one can see everyone else’s email address.

You wouldn’t put your consignors’ names and home addresses on the goods they entrust to you, would you? YOu wouldn’t send a nice electronic copy of your clients’ contact information to your competitor, would you? So why do it electronically, where it’s easy as pie to gather these up, for whatever nefarious purpose someone would have in mind?

Here’s more on the subject. And here’s Proper Email etiquette

Check to see if your professionalism shines through when you email your clients. If it doesn’t, fix it. Please.