Email marketing: in a death roll?

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Netizens (citizens of the ‘Net) are sick to death of the sheer volume of marketing material landing in their Inboxes lately. And can you blame them? I spend over $125 a year on SPAM blocking software and STILL get junk floating in about this drug or that many of them don’t even have order links in them!

Alas, email marketing is important for my businesses online. It’s not evil, it’s not immoral, it’s a valued ecommerce strategy for attracting customers. It’s akin to standing in the bazaar and calling for customers.
The challenge of eMail marketing

Those of us who use email promotion legitimately, suffer at the hands of our would be clients because of the actions of the unstoppable spammers. You can’t even pop an email off to a website owner any more or you’ll look like one of the automated Trolls wanting to put you on the top of the search engines or some such nonsense.

Filters and report-everything-as-spam happy users send countless valid communications into bulk/spam folders, never to read again. Legitimate companies are hurt the most.

Direct eMail Marketing and the Yellow Blinking Light

The unfortunate result is that caution must play the lead dog in your email marketing campaigns. Protect your back side. Spam related shutdown of your business, even if only temporarily, could be the end.
So, with all that in mind the following should be implemented when working with an email list:

• Provide a link in each message to the details of the list your client is on. You never know when they will forget who you are or what they signed up for.
• Use a double opt-in strategy. This is where the prospective subscriber gets a message asking them to validate that they did, in fact, want to get your email messages.
• Avoid “spammy” words like: free, click here, bonus offer, make money and get rich. These will get your message on the fast track to the automatic junk folder.
• Secure your list. Either via password on your own system or using a secure service online. You don’t want any viruses getting through, farming your list and sending spam out on your behalf.
• That being said, keep your virus protection software up to date.
• Try to avoid co-optin forms where a user signs up on one form and gets added to untold number of email lists. This can lead to spam reports in a hurry. If you do use co-optins, be sure to combine them with double opt-ins on your part of the list.
• Keep the content of each of your lists relevant to that list’s purpose don’t mix and match.

Lastly, be detailed in your list history. Just a list of names and email addresses is not enough to prove you are legit if you are accused of spamming. You need to track names, emails, IP addresses, dates and times of subscriptions and double opt-ins.

Once you get it up and running your system can continue to serve you well into the future.

Zachary