Email marketing has been realized as a great channel to reach prospective customers. Businesses can not only find new customers but also retain existing customers through email marketing. A series of emails help customers to be updated with the happenings at your company/blog.
And, oh yes the money is in the list!
Emails also serve the purpose of newsletters. There are both ethical and non-ethical practices of email marketing. Let me focus on ethical email marketing that comes quite naturally from the good guys.
Formation of email lists
Email marketing has great potential to boost your business. Having realized the potential, individuals as well as companies are tempted to pump emails to large numbers without finding the authenticity of those mail ids. One should never be lured of this shortcut for success.
Instead of gaining advantage through email marketing, your email address might be blocked or noted as a spam mail ID or your domain may by blocked by search engines after identifying spamming activities carried out through your mail ID.
Good guys will not resort to purchase email lists. They take time and effort to build email lists themselves. Obtaining consent from online visitors for the email subscription is very important. This makes your job easy.
Even though it is quite easy for us to buy email lists for our blogs, building our own lists helps to gain the trust of our audience. There are so many tools that we can use these days that can help us segment our lists to ensure that our email messages are interesting and add value to people's lives. For example, LeadPages is a very popular list building and segmentation tool. Watch this video from Ms. Ileane called Lead Pages Tutorial: How to Install LeadBoxes Popups to see how she does this effectively.
Convince users
Good guys will explain and convince visitors the usefulness of email subscription. Subscribers should be assured of protection of their email address. They should believe that you will not let their email addresses fall into wrong hands.
Opt-in and Opt-out
Users should have free option to subscribe and unsubscribe from getting emails. Opt-in can be checked at two levels. After registering their name and email address on your website or blog site, user should confirm the subscription through the email verification.
Double checking user authenticity through email verification helps you know that you are sending emails to the right party and you can comprehend that the email is not subscribed by third party without the knowledge of the actual owner of the email ID.
Users should have choice to unsubscribe from your emails at their expediency. You should honor the commitment by not sending a single email after user sends consent to not receive any more mails from you. Good guys will be able to achieve this competence as they fine tune the automated email marketing software as per the requisitions that handle subscribe and unsubscribe options automatically.
Learn more about compliance with the rules for commercial email and The CAN-SPAM Act from the Bureau of Consumer Protection
Subject line
While sending emails the subject should not mislead users. Capital letters, lengthy subject lines (more than 50 characters), usage of buy, discount and free words should be avoided in subject line. Let the natural flow of information happen and raise the instinct of the user to take an extra mile to further explore information and land in purchase zone of your products and services.
Email content and frequency
The frequency of email marketing messages also plays an important role. Good guys will not annoy users with multiple mails in a single day. The email should serve a purpose by informing, updating and saving time and money to the user.
The words used to convey the message should be clearly understood. They should not mislead or misrepresent the facts.
Beware of the email marketing laws
Email market promoters should be aware of the legislation made to this effect. Good guys will not only abide by the law but also will not infringe the freedom of others. Some countries have made legislations that prohibit sending commercial mails without winning user’s consent.
Stepping into other’s shoes
As an ancient popular quote reminds, “do unto others what you expect from them”, an active email promoter should remember this golden rule to deliver the best to audience. You don’t love to be annoyed. You don’t love to be spammed. You don't love to be acted upon impolite by receiving unwanted mails.
You don’t like your mail ID to be distributed into wrong hands. You expect complete freedom to subscribe and unsubscribe emails. Hence, if you are able to digest the golden rule, you will be the best guy to promote your concern through email marketing.
Avoid spam email marketing
In spite of taking all measures right from the souring of email lists to sending mails at intended frequency and managing subscription automatically and sending quality and useful information, email promoters may be stamped as spammers.
Hence, care should be taken to manage the subscription lists carefully and pumping of timely, useful and short messages to get the maximum benefit as a good guy with least annoyance to the user.
Are you being traced as a good guy in promoting your mails? Let me know in the comments.