3 Important Rules In eMail Marketing

Once you decide to create an opt-in email form in your website, it is not just the matter of sending your list of subscribers your promotional stuffs, but also familiarize yourself with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to be sure that you are meeting the legal requirements of email marketing. These are laws that applied to help protect the privacy of the internet users from spamming and unwanted emails.Like a horror film, email marketing often gets a bad rap. It is always understandably misunderstood by many with the ungodly amounts of spam flooding inboxes across the universe. Believe it or not, legitimate email exists, and as an unfortunate side effect of all of that spam, it is often a struggle to get these legitimate email through to their subscribers due to overly sensitive spam filters. It is a battle email marketers face everyday.If you are new to the game, or have been considering stepping into it, there are 3 things you should keep in mind before getting your feet wet!Take notice of your unsuccessful mail delivery.These are bounced emails that might happen if the server was too busy, email address go bad, people change email address or ISPs and so on. Users Inbox may run out of space. A proliferation of email accounts means everyone and his 90 year old grandma has a Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo account or two, or even five. With only a few megabytes of storage space, users inbox fills up quickly. If you try to deliver mail to these accounts, you get a warning message.Your system should also be able to respond to these bounced emails and act appropriately. Email servers are smart. If they see you bouncing too much mail, to too many subscribers, they’ll block you off their network segment entirely. Then you won’t be able to reach anyone on your server, even good addresses.Managing your opt-in list by deleting those address that bounced so that you have an accurate statistic and records tells you how many are actually receiving your mail. A clean list will raise your response rate!Always provide an unsubscribe feature at the bottom of your email.Send your newsletter or email to people who opt-in ONLY. Double opt-in options are even more better. When they have to confirm their subscription, there is less chance of any misunderstanding and spamming. It also includes making sure to give the subscribers instructions on how to opt-out, or unsubscribe from further messages.When someone in your list files a request to be unsubscribe, always take the request seriously. If you don’t take them off, you are considered sending spam emails.If you are reported as a spammer, you and your business can get into trouble. You can be reported to an authorities like Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or SpamCop and maybe blacklisted by many Internet Service Providers. This way, you will lose your email list and even potential subscribers.Provide accurate and related content only.Do not provide unrelated or disturbing content to your list. It is hard to decipher the age of the recipient and many complains may stem from these. Stick to the nature of your business and niche.If you keep the above points in mind, you are more likely to get your spam free email delivered, and this is one of the greatest obstacles to overcome with any email marketing campaign. You can also have a healthy relationship with your subscribers.
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