Legitimate/Wanted Email Marketing (No SPAM, No BACN)

Email Marketing can walk a fine line between great advertising and villainous SPAM or worthless BACN. You’re sending out advertising emails to all your existing customers and/or leads trying to get them to come to your site and buy something – simple marketing basics. However, if your email recipients find your emails annoying, pointless, or even detrimental, you have entered the Email Marketing pork industry:

 

 

BACN - Subscribed emails that are unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Email you want, but not right now.

 

It’s all about how your email recipients view your emails. If your business’s Email Marketing is viewed as villainous or dull, your emails are SPAM and BACN. At this point, your Email Marketing is hurting you more than helping you. Assuming you are only emailing subscribers, here are some tips to get the most out of your Email Marketing. Remember, keep it legitimate and wanted:

 

Avoid being SPAM

 

Promise your subscribers that their email will never be given/sold to anyone. Of course, someone proving that their email has been sold is rather difficult. However, if all your email recipients begin receiving emails about FREE CANADIAN Rx!, they may put up tough email blocking systems or even change their email (doubtful they’ll sign up for yours or anybody else’s emails again).

  

Overkill. I signed up to receive emails from a few different computer parts retailers because they have some great deals. However, they all send marketing emails every single day. Even if I am interested, I don’t have the budget for a $200 a day hard drive habit. Needless to say, I unsubscribed from them, only to find most of them didn’t unsubscribe me (apparently there was no way to do so). So I blocked them – they cluttered my inbox, didn’t provide me with anything, and proved they are not trustworthy in their marketing practices. If any email recipient says this about your emails, you have become the villain. So limit your marketing to once a week or once a month. Make sure you have something to offer (discussed more in BACN). Have your Email Marketing apply to customers’ needs and don’t try to scattershot with everything your business has to offer.

  

Knock knock. Who’s there? Name a spammer. Go ahead………you can’t can you? Unless they are using a false front (or attaching to a successful company’s name), you will never see a company name in the email subject from spammers. You need to let your customers know that it’s your email in their inbox. When you knock on someone’s door and they say “who is it?” you don’t reply “Get your ONLINE DIPLOMA FREE with GREAT MORGTAGE RATES and HOT XXX ACTION!” - no, of course not. In the subject, let them know it’s you and what you are offering - Subject: Daly Communications Group LLC, New Email Marketing Tips.

 

Wave goodbye – quickly! I mentioned before about not being able to unsubscribe from some email subscriptions; this is the truest sign that a spammer is at the other end of the email. I just proved to them I’m receiving their emails so they pounced on the opportunity. Another instance where I unsubscribed from an email subscription - the business sending them wanted me to fill out pages about why I was unsubscribing (which is their problem, not mine). The simplest answer for unsubscriptions is to say goodbye and have that be the end of it. However, if you offer something to them on their way out it’s a second chance without asking anything of them. Offer a concession, it can only do good as they are already “annoyed” and you are trying to help the situation.

 

Professional expectations. The craziest spam I get ranges from one sentence with a link about fake watches in broken English to nothing but graphics pasted together to form an amateur pornographic puzzle. The same way a recipient knows it’s your business’s email from the subject line, they should be used to how your emails are set up: news items here, on sale items here, clearance items here, link to you business’s site here. If these areas are installed with fresh content regularly, you’ve really opened up a chain store through email. People know where products are in the store, but don’t know exactly what’s new and interesting in those sections.

 

Avoid being BACN

 

Dear, <insert name here>. It is important that your recipients know you are a business, but it’s even more important that you personalize your emails to each customer as much as possible. When I get an email from a business and my name is used (spelled correctly mind you) and possibly mention my geographical region, I find it carries a bit more weight than something that looks like an ad in a nationwide magazine. The technologies available for Email Marketing make personalization relatively simple. A few extra steps in your Email Marketing can make you look a personal friend to your email recipients or skipping those steps can make you a faceless corporate machine.

 

Exciting because you can! Boring because you cannot. If you are sending out Email Marketing just because you can, you are sending it for the wrong reason. You need to have something to offer your recipients. This may be difficult at times as nothing might have changed in a week at your business. Nevertheless, you can get creative, pace yourself, and separate the exciting from the humdrum. If you have different sections in your email, sometimes it’s best to apply your most exciting deal or info to only one section and save another exciting bit until your next email. Spread the excitement out if you need to as this keeps people checking your business’s emails. If a serialized TV show had everything exciting happen in the pilot episode, it would have no viewers left by the season finale.

 

SWAG: Stuff We All Get. Free stuff and contests in Email Marketing should be handled very carefully. Most spammers use this and if recipients see it from you, they can become wary of you emails. However, if you follow a few easy rules, it could get recipients clicking through to your site quicker than ever:

• Free stuff comes at a price. Recipients should have to offer up something to get some something back. I know it’s a contradiction, but it’s the reason any business offers free stuff.
• Never ask for more contact information, like phone numbers, in exchange for free stuff. This is a big turn off to recipients. Only ask for what they think about your business, you marketing practices, and/or their shopping needs.
• Shrink your contest’s geographical areas. If you are a nationwide company, promise winners in every state. If you are statewide, promise winners in every county. Most radio stations offer prizes like this to increase recipients’ chances. Increased chances = increased recipient involvement.
• Offer free stuff and prizes people actually want. Have them apply to your business or something presently popular. People don’t really want bumper stickers of your business, but they do want free products of services from your business. They don’t want tickets to a community theater troupe’s production of Cats, but they do want tickets to Lion King on Broadway. You should be giving you customers what you would want to win, not what you want to get rid of.

 

Clipping coupons. Discount coupons are something that are easier to measure and have your recipients coming to your site (or place of business to use them). You ask nothing of the customer to get these discounts and since the customer asked to be on your email list anyway, they probably planned on shopping at your business. Discounts are usually the best lure to put in a subject line. I really don’t care if a business has hired a new executive and won’t open that email, but if they offer me a coupon for 30% off my purchase of $50 or more, I might take a look at their products and see if they have anything I can’t live without.

 

Email Marketing – Keeping it Legitimate/Wanted

 

Always remember, it’s not a matter of whether your Email Marketing actually is SPAM or BACN, its all about how your recipients perceive your emails. Any marketing guru can tell you that people are fickle – they always want the best new idea or deal. Your business is on a level playing field with major marketing agencies around the world in Email Marketing. You need to be able to step up your Email Marketing content to get your customers and leads to open your emails more than an NYC marketing firm’s emails.

 

If you try to cheat or just throw noise out at your customers, they will drop or block you in a second, even just based on one bad email from your company. So, give your customer quality content, quality deals, and don’t give too much, too early.

 

And always: KEEP IT LEGITIMATE/WANTED, or you’re Email Marketing ends up as SPAM or BACN.