You May be spamming and not know it!
You would think that most people would consider email spam to be something that they haven’t asked for, unsolicited email offering to help with certain physical problems. A recent survey entitled “Spam Complainers Survey” suggests that there may be reasons to be concerned if you think you are sending emails that your permission based mailing list want to receive.
The broad findings of the survey are these:
• 56% feel email from known senders is spam if it’s “just not interesting to me”
• 50% believe “too frequent emails from companies I know” is spam
• 31% are irked by “emails that were once useful but are not relevant anymore”
Opt-in subscription is no longer enough.
Lessons to be learned from this are:
- Email needs to be relevant and interesting. It’s no good just telling your list about how well things are going for you and which new contracts you’ve just won. You need to give then something that’s useful to them, something that will make life easier for them or solve a problem. Nobody finds it uninteresting to get discounts or special offers on something that they need to buy.
- Email should be sent at regular intervals and only when necessary, it’s no good sending out an email just for the sake of it and then filling it with content that the reader will find boring and irrelevant. You need to put yourself in the shoes of your readers and try to anticipate what they expect from you.
- It’s very easy to start of with good intentions of writing and sending interesting and relevant emails, but you need to make sure that you can keep it up (oops, almost back to the spam mails again)! One way of overcoming this problem might be to create a series of emails early on and then schedule them to be released as a campaign. Auto responders are a good way of doing this.
For all of the above, many of the problems can be overcome by analysing your email results and looking at open rates and unsubscribe rates. If you see open rates dropping off and unsubscribe rates increasing, then you need to do something about your content. Measuring reaction to links in your emails can be useful and will give you a pointer to the type of content that your readers are reacting to.
Let us know how you feel about emails that you receive and the type of content that you think is useful. What would lead you to unsubscribe or report the sender as a spammer?
