Can I promote our site by email?

Question

I've recently started thinking that law students would be a great target audience for the Law site, and so I'm planning on sending a couple of emails to student law societies introducing them to our site, giving a brief overview of what we do, and asking them to mention us to their members.

I've looked at Should we be reaching out to existing expert communities? If so, how?, and the answer and comments on that discuss what form of promotion is appropriate, and what led to the early success of SO. I'm asking whether this form of promotion is permissible.

A sample of what the email would look like is below, but the exact form isn't excessively important. I've yet to flesh out the details.

Are there any issues with doing this? (I've posted this to MSE because it's likely relevant to many other beta sites.)

---

Dear X,

My name is James and I'm a moderator pro tempore on Law Stack Exchange, and would like to briefly let you know what we do, and invite you to mention us to your members.

[brief description of Stack Exchange and QA model]

[brief listing/description of site scope]

[reasons it would be beneficial to members]

[ask them to mention it to members]

Kind regards,
James

N.B.: I'm a volunteer, and I'm not an agent/representative of Stack Overflow, Inc.

^{Also, I'm aware of the name change, but I'm just using what's in the footer at the moment. I'll change it if/when I send the email out.
Also also, yeah, my name's James. My secret's out.}

Answer 1

I appreciate your enthusiasm here, but I would consider this to fall on the "spammy" side of the line unless you have some specific, concrete reason to believe that the recipients of your mail will be interested in the site. Merely having some affiliation with the site topic (i.e. being law students) isn't quite enough.

Please don't stop thinking about ways to increase engagement; I for one am happy to chat about it at any time!