The volume of email marketing we receive is staggering. I'm not talking about run of the mill spam selling Canadian drugs or email lists (in case you want to continue the spam circle of life, I guess). I'm talking about industry specific messages that steadily flow into our inboxes throughout the day.

Some days I get six or eight messages from iAgentNetwork alone. Add Channel Partners, our dozens of providers, and various industry newsletters and you end up with a mountain of content that I almost never get through.

We don't want to add to that pile. However, we do want to maintain a dialog with our partners and keep them updated. We're about to roll out what we believe is a way to accomplish these objectives.

We've used Mailchimp as our email marketing platform for a few years now. We have one big mailing list, and whenever we have something to share it goes out to everyone. Shotgun marketing at its best. Well, not everyone wants every piece of information we have to offer.

Luckily, our mail system has a way to deal with that. We're beginning to segment our list and make it possible for subscribers to manage their profile and tell us how often they want to hear from us and what kind of information they're interested in. Once we have finalized the categories, we'll be sending subscribers an email inviting them to click a link and manage their profile.

When you do that, you'll see something like this (not exactly...this is actually the signup version of the form):

The idea is that it's not an all or nothing arrangement. We don't want you to get so annoyed with our emails that you unsubscribe. We'd rather give you the ability to give us feedback in the way of those preferences.

It'll be an evolving thing, to be sure, but the idea is that we want to make sure you get the information you want to get. Spam sucks, and the last thing we want to do is annoy our partners.