Essential practices for email marketing
The following are all things a responsible email marketer should do to maximise your email campaigns and avoiding the pitfalls of being blacklisted and risking damaging your reputation with customers and prospects:
1) Ensure you have permission to send to an email address which should entail a 2-stage opt in process which requires confirmation. Check with any one who has been on your list for more than 12 months if they wish to stay on it and keep details of confirmations.
2) Avoid damage to you own reputation by sending too many emails too often as these can result in spam complaints. Ensure names are removed promptly and you learn from any spam complaints you receive. Keep your lisk up-to-date to minimise the risk of complaints and be prepared to work at your list as the average is 30% churn on email addresses each year.
3) Concentrate on quality rather than quantity for the names on your list. Ascertain your target audience and work at increasing your list following permssion-based practices.
4) Respect the privacy of your email recipients by including a privacy statement with your opt-in procedure. Should your privacy policy change then ensure you repeat the opt-in process.
5) Grab your readers’ attention! Add an attention-grabbing subject line as your email needs to stand out amongst the crowd. Back this up with good design and formatting and ensure that your key messages are delivered ‘above the fold’ i.e. they will appear on the screen without having to scroll down. Clearly identify who the email is being sent from.
6) Test and test again on different email clients such as Outlook, Google Mail, Yahoo! etc. as they can render quite differently on each of them. Some of thee will not automatically download images so you need to make sure that yor images are tagged correctly so at least a recipient will see some text rather than a gaping hole. Test your email against spam filters to see if it get blocked.
7) Make the subscription functions obvious enabling readers to forward, contact the sender and unsubscribe easily.
8) Conduct a survey from time-to-time to make sure that you are delivering what people want to read and at the required frequency. Check to see if their interests have changed over time. Analyse the results of the survey and analyse any statistics from your emails to see which articles are being most read and which are not and use this information to deliver more of what your customers want.
If all this seems a bit daunting, then why not contact us to see how we can help with your email marketing campaign.
