Five years ago Seth Godin wrote:

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you… Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.

He then made the prediction that in three years time (i.e. two years ago) this advice that he was offering would be so commonplace that everyone would be following it. Well that is not our experience – our experience is that our in-box and our spam-filter is still full of emails that we do not want, from companies that we would not miss if they stopped emailing us. We’re sure that the same is true for you.

So the question remains – if you have found a list of emails from somewhere or you have been approached by a business that is offering you email lists that will help you reach hundreds or thousands of potential customers, what should you do?

Our advice is that you should proceed with caution. Think about the people who won’t want your email and who won’t trust you any longer if you send them spam – they are likely to be much more numerous and potentially more influential than the people who do respond to your unrequested emails.

We would suggest that you immediately start earning the right to send your sales messages. Write great copy that will have people coming back for more and send that, personally, to a few people that you know are influential. Post the same writing on your blog and then ask the readers if they would like to give you their email address in return for more of the same great writing delivered direct to their inbox. Use your social media feed to make people feel something: make them laugh, cry, tell their stories or get out and do something. Then give them the chance to sign up to your newsletter for more of the same. Post beautiful, uplifting and emotive pictures and then invite people to follow you on Facebook, twitter or Instagram.

This process will obviously be slow and time consuming. But if you start with the right 10 people and really delight them, you will turn them into fans and they will tell their contacts and their friends – the people that trust your ten fans – and you will bask in the reflected trust that they are creating for you. In the long run, this is what will make your emails and social media updates the ones that people welcome when they arrive.