Since hate is not a buying emotion and the government makes the rules, here's what you need to know to become an appreciated email sender.
Let's start with the law.
Now, what I'm about to say is not legal advice in any way, shape, or form. It's just a summary of possible issues. Use a licensed attorney to make sure you follow the law when it comes to email marketing. And the main law governing commercial email is known as the CAN-SPAM Act.
You should read and comply with all parts of the CAN-SPAM Act, but here are the major guidelines.
- First and foremost, you need a relationship of affirmative consent between your business and anyone to whom you send a marketing email.
- You also need to provide a simple and free way for your subscribers to opt out of receiving future emails.
- The industry standard is one or two clicks to unsubscribe.
- Also, make sure the information in your email is true and accurate.
- You are not allowed to fake your from line, use misleading subject lines, or send emails from a false email address.
- Finally, make sure you include your physical business address in every email. A post office box is okay.
Keeping your emails legally compliant will keep you out of trouble with the government, but your job as an email marketer isn't to make the government happy; your emails need to impress prospects and customers.
Here are three tips to make sure your email marketing is well-received and appreciated by your subscribers.
- First, ask for explicit permission before sending marketing emails. I will about permission and building a permission-based email list in another post.
- Second, ask your subscribers to share their preferences when they join your email list and send only the information your subscribers request.
- Third, make sure that you send emails with the proper frequency and relevance. In general, people will tolerate almost any email frequency as long as your email content is valuable and relevant. For example, weather is a daily occurrence, so weather information is likely to be appreciated on a daily frequency. If you send a daily email asking people to buy something however, you'd better be pretty sure that your subscribers are interested in daily deals.
Now that you have a basic understanding of becoming an appreciated email sender, let's leverage your knowledge by moving to our next topic, building an email list.