Email Marketing: How Not to Be a Dirty Rotten Spammer

By Sonia Simone

Do you remember when you were a kid and crossed the street without looking? Remember how mad your mom got? Even if you were within your legal rights and crossing in a crosswalk, it just takes one oncoming car that doesn't see you and you're flatter than Wile E. Coyote.

The "official" definition of spam is unsolicited bulk email with a commercial and/or malicious intent. The U.S. 2004 CAN-SPAM law makes it illegal to send commercial email with a misleading header, without a postal address, without a way to unsubscribe, or if the addresses were harvested in various nefarious ways.

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Flickr Creative Commons image by uberculture

Comments

[James Hipkin]

Customer data can help your emails be useful.

Understand what your customers are interested in, based on past purchase behavior, and keep your primary message focused there. If you have the data, and the budget, next-likely-purchase models can be very useful for this.

Customer data can tell you what else purchasers of product A bought. Make this your secondary offer. Track the results and record the info in the database.

Keep this up and soon your emails stop being advertising and become content.

[Michael Martine]

Geez, girl, you always have the best pictures!

This looks good, I'm totally signing up.

[Evan]

Evan
[email protected]

Interesting marketing twist - talking about the objection before the pitch.

[Sonia Simone]

Thanks, Michael. I'm grateful to Skellie for her post on how to mine the Flickr Creative Commons. I probably spend more time finding images than I should, but it's a very satisfying part of the process for me, I must admit.

Evan, it's not so much about when you address the objection, as making your marketing useful in itself whether or not anyone buys. That's how I see it, anyway.

[Sonia Simone]

Good stuff, James. Just plain old watching your customers' behavior can reveal all kinds of things.

For individuals or small organizations, another very handy thing you can do with an email list is just send out a free survey. Maybe you give them a freebie for filling it out, maybe not, depending on your relationship.

[Kelly]

Sonia,

Signed up yesterday. Love how you worked the request to sign up in and I didn't even see it coming, because the post was so well-written. After that, I couldn't resist!

Regards,

Kelly

[James Hipkin]

Sonia,

Surveys are a great tool. Not only do you gather good info about your customers you also demonstrate your willingness to listen.

We have seen up to a 60% reduction in attrition among survey respondents. Some of this is a tautology but, when you consider attrition was down up to 40% among survey recipients who didn't respond, you have to give the survey some credit for the loyalty improvement. When we reported the results of the survey in the next communication and told customers what was being done with the info, loyalty was improved again.

Relationship building / loyalty comes from creating value beyond the transactional / functional benefits of your product. Surveys are another great, win-win way to do this.

I'm telling my staff to sign up for your course.

[Sonia Simone]

James, I love that. I think it makes perfect sense that surveys will increase loyalty--on an individual level, don't we feel more loyalty to someone who actually wants to know how we feel? And that is a great point, when we come back and let people know how we used that information, it's even stronger.

Yep, Kelly, I'm suuuuuper sneaky. :) Not to worry, I solemnly promise I will not turn into a scary salesperson on you. 90% useful information, 10% (at most) soft sell, that's my formula.

[web promotion company California]

Email is more effective because it's something personal that comes to your email box,Most people see their email box as their personal space. I think when it comes to email, if you didn't specifically sign up for a list, you'd think your privacy was violated. thanks for the post.

-faith-

[jamiedolan]

Thanks for your e-mail messages. I am really enjoying your comments on ethical e-mail marketing and newsletters.
Thanks very much,
Jamie Dolan

[oyun]

Ich bin wirklich genießen Sie Ihre Kommentare zu ethischen E-Mail-Marketing und Newsletter.

[aspen mountain]

Im such a newbie when it comes to all this, thanks for taking the time to write this up, keep them coming! was a wonderful read.

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Actually spamming is one of the most common problem in the field of marketing, spamming is also a cause why some website dropped their ranking.

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[Steven Davis]

Sonia -

It looks like the link to the full article is gone :(

Please update the link in your new site.

... also, you include a link to this article in your excellent email series - [ContentClass] #6: Hard Sell vs. Soft Sell

You may want to update it.

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happy.and thank you for your efforts.

[Sean]

The bus is so cute.

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