Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Email Marketing with Courtesy


Email marketing is a fairly inexpensive form of advertising. You can potentially reach thousands or millions of customers at almost no cost. However, many companies have been using this technique indiscriminately. The result of this is a huge amount of unsolicited emails (i.e. spam) that end up annoying people.

When email marketing is done badly, the offending company is often called a spammer and can potentially violate the law. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

1) Permission
We should get permission from the recipient before sending them emails. You could have a registration form on your website, where the user can decide whether to receive emails from you.

2) Opt-out Link
Every email should include a link where the user can unregister so that they won’t receive any further emails from you.

3) No Purchased List
Some companies might buy an email list from a provider. This is very dangerous as the recipients who give permission to the provider might not welcome other emails from you.

When you’re doing any email marketing campaign, ask yourself a question, “how would I feel if I were the one receiving this email?” This common sense approach will help you to identify whether your emails are useful and relevant to the recipient or not.

No comments: