Smart Email Marketing
ECommerce Guide published an article today about improving your email effectiveness. In these days, where more than two-thirds of all email is spam, businesses have to a do a better job of marketing to their customers, and prevent themselves from being labeled as spammers.
Here are the highlights from today's article on how you can improve your email campaigns to be a more responsible marketer, and generate more business as well:
- Segment your list - do a better job of sending targeted messages to different demographics within your customer base. More personalized emails look less like spam, and will likely be more meaningful to the individual customer.
- Choose your words carefully - certain words are good indicators that an email is spam. Certainly avoid using "Viagra" in your emails! But also words like "free", "sale", "click here" etc.
- Be upfront with your customers - when they sign up to receive your emails, give them a true indication of how often you will be emailing them. Remember the old saying, "less is more!"
- Have a difficult opt-in and an easy opt-out process for customers receiving your emails. A difficult opt-in process (one extreme: via phone or writing) gives you more reliable emails and customers that are really interested in receiving promotions from you. An easy opt-out process (one-click unsubscribe, for example) puts customers at ease, knowing if they get emailed too frequently, they can simply opt out.
More resources:
ECommerce Guide Article
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
Popular Spam Phrases (This list isn't fantastic, but it was the best I could find quickly)
Posted by joseph at July 14, 2004 09:16 AM
