September 6, 2007
Responsible Email Marketing
Firstly, why would you want to be responsible?
1. Reputation - keep it intact.
2. Improving customer relationships (and not harming them).
3. To be a good internet citizen, and make the internet a
better place.
Responsible email marketing consists of the following:
Subscribers - only email those people who have subscribed to
receive your emails, or where you can justifiably demonstrate
that their consent to receive your emails has been implied.
So what is justifiable? Here are a couple of examples:
A. You have a bowl in your premises asking people to drop in
their business card to win a prize, and you have a notice on
the bowl that email addresses will be added to your mailing list
to receive information from your business.
B. As part of the process of selling a product to a person, you
ask for the customer’s email address.
Relevance - only send out information that is relevant to the
recipient and associated with the purpose for which you received
the email. For example, if you gathered the email address in
response to selling a motor vehicle to a customer then sending
that customer an email about a business opportunity would be
inappropriate. However, sending an email about vehicle
accessories, servicing, road-side assistance and new vehicles
may be relevant.
Volume - I recently ordered self-address label printing from an
online printer. After receiving the printed material, I now
receive approximately one email per day regarding some deal or
other, or requesting that I complete a survey. The constant
emails are very annoying. With each email I receive I become:
1) less likely to recommend the company to anyone else, despite
the fact that their service was very good and inexpensive, and
2) less likely to order from the company again, and more likely
to ask to be removed from their email list.
Keep the number of emails you send to your contacts to a
reasonable volume!
Attachments - keep them small in size; no more than 300KB.
You can’t assume that everyone has broadband and therefore can
download emails quickly. Nor can you assume that everyone
checks their email everyday and wont run the risk of exceeding
their mailbox size limit.
Unsubscribe - always give the recipient the opportunity to
unsubscribe from your emails, and make it easy. To make this
easy for yourself you should use an un-subscribe service, which
will also ensure that you don’t accidentally send a later email
to that address. The only time you may send another email would
be to confirm that you have in fact removed the recipient from
your list, and to ask for feedback as to why they wish to be
removed (if you didn’t get this at the time they un-subscribed).
Business or Pleasure - try to only send business information to
business email addresses, and only send personal information to
personal addresses. In this way, a person will consider their
personal email most likely when they are at home outside of
working hours and will have the time to focus on it. On the
other hand, they will receive their business related email at
work, rather than during the personal time. If at all possible,
when you collect an email address find out whether it is a
personal or business address, and try to obtain both types of
email addresses. If one of the email addresses bounces (i.e.
the email cannot be delivered, perhaps a person has moved
employment), having an alternative email address can be helpful.
Bouncing - don’t continue to send emails to addresses that have
previously bounced. This is just increasing the traffic on the
internet for no good purpose.
Email Format - give recipients the choice of receiving text only
emails (as opposed to HTML format), and then only send the
format that they choose. The recipients who only want text
emails (for security or other reasons) will be very grateful.
Much of the characteristics of responsible email marketing
described above are actually embodied in spam legislation. Spam
legislation also applies to SMS and other electronic messages.
It is no longer a matter of just being considerate and
maintaining your reputation, but also a matter of law.
If you need help implementing some of the characteristics
described above, you may need a tool such as eNudge(TM)
(http://www.eNudge.com.au) which allows you to easily manage bounced
emails, un-subscribe, and email formats.
Heather Maloney is a Director of Contact Point IT Services
(http://www.ContactPoint.com.au), providing solutions to businesses
that focus on delivering measurable business benefits.
