The real email marketing challenge
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 02, 2008
In a comment, JD asks, "When will the email marketing industry start actively working to stop spam?"The first step in fighting spam is not to send any yourself. That is this year's big challenge for you. Don't send spam.
Now before you leave in disgust at the obviousness of that statement, let me explain.
A few years ago, it was easy not to send spam. As long as you weren't grabbing random email addresses off websites or cheap CDs and sending them ads for body-changing pills you were pretty much "not spamming."
Today is different. There is too much email floating around. Those involved in delivering and reading your emails are waiting for any excuse not to have to do so.
Anti-spam technologies and your subscribers are looking at every email with their fingers poised over the "this is spam" button. And the more often your emails cause those fingers to twitch, the less chance you have of getting through to the inbox next time.
"Not spamming" now involves not doing a whole host of things which might otherwise cause a finger twitch. For example:
- Sending too many emails
- Sending boring emails
- Sending irrelevant emails
- Sending poorly coded or formatted emails
- Sending promotional emails to people that didn't explicitly ask for them
- Sending anything other that what you promised to send
- Sending emails high on sales hype, low on value
- etc....
The first step in meeting that challenge is understanding the real meaning of permission. That when experts say only send email to people who explicitly requested it, they mean exactly that.
And all your emails should be directed toward ensuring this explicit desire to get your messages is never lost.
The second step in meeting that challenge is honesty with yourself. It is very easy to duck and weave around the idea of permission...leave out the "explicit" bit...forget about keeping permission alive...convince yourself that you are doing people a favor by sending them your messages.
Who hasn't fumed at getting irrelevant email from company X because they assumed you were probably interested in newsletter A or brand B because you signed up for newsletter X or mails about brand Z?
Chad White recently took several big brands to task for this kind of subtle permission abuse, a topic covered on this blog in the past.
This key point about the need for honest self-appraisal is made by others wiser than myself. Derek Harding makes an eloquent appeal for better permission practices in this new article, noting that "...too many marketers engage in self-denial on this subject."
Loren McDonald also evangelizes regularly on this topic, most recently admonishing email marketers not to get too smug about Facebook's privacy problems. He points out that "...we have to remember that our users are the ones who are in charge now."
The danger for email marketing as a whole is that not enough marketers understand or care about all this. Too many people look for a quick result from mining email lists, rather than nurturing them. As Spencer Kollas writes, "Some of the folks out there just don't want to learn."
For the individual marketer, the challenge is not to spam. For the industry, it's to teach people not to spam. We'll see how it goes in 2008.
More on permission | Tags: email marketing, permission marketing, spam
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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