A colleague and I are in the process of  creating an opt-in email list for our company and we’re running into a few issues:  1) a general lack of knowledge of best practices when it comes to e-mail marketing which is understandable given that the others don’t have a background in marketing, 2) the desire to keep doing what we’ve done which is basically spamming people (because we have not asked for permission) and 3) the argument about “how else are we supposed to reach these people?”.   What’s frustrating is that the organization has operated in such a way for several years now that this is basically second nature to the staff so a change of this magnitude (and it is a major change in mindset) is uncomfortable for a lot of people.  While I’ve seen quite a few articles and blog posts  (Seth Godin’s post is a great one) recently on making your list opt-in, what I haven’t seen are actual examples from companies who have made this shift and how they’ve dealt with the internal pushback.  If anyone has examples they can share with me, I’d love to read them.