Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
I am just interested to know some ideas to improve email marketing way, but without even irritating the recipient.
Can some one pin out some check list for avoiding mails to be sealed as SPAM?
Can someone or more post their successful emarketing suggestions and experiences?
Thanks,
2. Have a plan in place for what to do when you get complaints or rather when your ISP gets complaints. You will get complaints even if it is a legitimate email campaign. Some ISP will shut down your site until the issue is resolved. You may want to check with your ISP.
Overall email campaigns have proven very ineffective for us lately.
0) Give good reason for customers to opt-in - for example use email to tell them when product is in stock or released and then if this first experience of email from you is okay they might subscribe to main newsletter
1) Forget buying lists - low conversion, high complaint rate, too expensive overall. Some lists might actually work but I will be damned if I ever buy a list without testing a good sample of it first.
2) Give options for people to easily change formats and definately allow people to easily get off the list - getting complaint (especially to your upstream provide) is worse than quietly losing subscriber. Track this ratio however as it will show how well you doing.
3) Use technically proficient email delivery provider who knows his stuff - more and more people now get SP2 that blocks images in emails, this means there will be more upside in attaching images to email.
4) Design email with the user in mind - its not web page, keep the size below 100k (with images counted). We developed some nice analytical software that shown us visually parts of email that were not used by customers, so we eliminated these parts.
5) Dont communicate too often but don't do it too rarely either as people will forget they subscribed and think you spamming them! For us (B2C UK site) ideal time was once a week but we provided customers with option to receive emails less frequently.
6) Test, test and test - use good tracking system and continuously strive to improve response and conversion rates by trying new designs and most importantly -
7) Be relevant - we managed to increase share of email marketing in total online business big time only because we targeted our campaigns well in the time when few people thought of that (meaning year 2000 here). We got our drop off ratio down from 0.60% to 0.10% because we made emails relevant.
Why not build a site with an Opt In section that once they enter there email address they then have to varify the details are correct and that they want to recieve the emails.
Give them a real Opt Out link on the emails everytime and as everyone says, design the emails with the user in mind.
Just my 2 cents worth.
