Howdy,
We are about to move our entire e-mail infrastructure to Office 365 but one issue came up during a discussion.
I have a few questions regarding using Office 365 in a sales/marketing environment.
We have a large sales team which very periodically sends out offers and introductions to prospective clients via e-mail. Most of these e-mails are personalized and the e-mail addresses itself are existing leads. Our sales team usually cold-call these leads and if they don't answer, follow up with an e-mail. It's a very common practice in our industry (Law) and we have been successful with this the last 15 years.
Most of these e-mails could be considered "unsolicited" or "lawful spam" since we comply with the CAN-SPAM act. Every e-mail includes our full legal address, as well a opt-out link. Many of the potential prospects have or had contact with us before.
Here are my questions:
1) Based on the Terms & Conditions of Microsoft it seems that sending "unsolicited commercial" e-mails is prohibited. However I can't imagine that every company on Office 365 is using the service only for their internal email and that sending commercial e-mails (even unsolicited) is a common daily practice. What does Microsoft define as "unsolicited commercial" e-mails?
2) Just to give an idea, each sales rep makes about 40-60 calls per day - the majority following up with an e-mail. Overall we are talking about 2000 e-mails per day. Is that considered small or large and how would that impact our office 365 account?
3) Are we OK using Office 365 using our sales practices without running into issues? I am asking because we don't want to move to Office 365, just to find out that we can't do that -or- creates a legal issue. After all we are operating in the law-field and want to makes sure that we stay compliance with all partners at all times.
Thank you,
Andy