Hiding your emails...

From Seth Godin

"Promiscuous dispersal of your email address

I just went through the hassle of trying to get some B2B firms the details needed to give me an informed quote on a project.

I visited eight sites. Six of them hide their email address. They use forms of one sort of another. One firm refused to accept more than 500 characters in the "how can we help you" box, while three of them wanted to know what state I was in, etc.

Email contact is like a first date. If you show up with a clipboard and a questionnaire, it's not going to go well, I'm afraid. The object is to earn permission to respond.

If you sell something, set up an address like "sales@xyz.com". Put this on your home page, "contact us if you're looking for more information or a price quote." Sure, you'll get a lot of spam, but deleting spam is a lot easier than finding customers. (Hint, ask your IT people to make it a mailto link, with a subject line built in. That way, you can use the subject line to find the good email)."

This is an interesting phenomenon. When the internet first arrived on the scene, everyone was excited to get email. Now we live in a world of ubiquitous spam and people are afraid to give out their personal, or sometimes, business email addresses. It's the same thing has having an unlisted telephone number. What are you trying to accomplish? Sure you might get less spam, but making yourself available to your potential clients/customers is more important, isn't it?...