Recorded Devilery » Email Marketing

Spam Laws

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:11:24 +0000

One of the best ways to avoid being branded as a spammer is to make sure you are using a permission-based tool that follows strict, permission-based guidelines to protect users from sending spam such as the one we use at Recorded Devilery.

Some useful guidelines include:
• Communication – Your subscriber registration page must state why you are collecting the visitor’s email address and how you plan to use it. Also it should be clear that you have agreed to not sell or rent your lists.
• Verification – New subscribers are automatically sent an email confirming their interest in receiving emails from you. This is known as an opt in and is the basis of permission based email marketing.
• Unsubscription – Every email sent should contain an unsubscribe link. When a recipient clicks the link your subscriber lists are automatically updated to prevent the sending of unwanted emails.

Review your email marketing
It might be useful, from time to time to take a moment to read the following questions. You REALLY don’t want to answer “Yes” to any of the following:
1. Are you using a purchased list of any kind?

2. Are you sending to non-specific addresses such as: sales@domain.com, business@domain.com, webmaster@domain.com, info@domain.com, or other general addresses?

3. Do you have any abuse@, postmaster@, or hostmaster@ domains on your list?

4. Are you sending to distribution lists or mailing lists which indirectly send to a variety of email addresses?

5. Are you mailing to anyone who has not explicitly agreed to join your mailing list?

6. Does your email’s subject line contain false or misleading information?
Answering “Yes” to any of the above questions could see you labelled as a spammer.

Christmas emails

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:32:17 +0000

Three things to avoid when you carry out your Christmas email campaign:

Sending far too many emails: If you send too many emails over Christmas, your valuable readers will just regard it as spam. As always send only emails that are of value to your readers and which you know they will want to read.
Offering discounts: Discounts are fine and a lot of people will be happy to receive them, but make sure that discounts are enough, there must be other ways you can convey the value that you’re offering, try and be creative and offer something unusual.
Sending and not tracking: If you are looking after your own email marketing, rather than using a managed service like that offered by Recorded Devilery. Make sure you have a means of tracking and analysing who is opening your emails and what links they are visiting when they do.

Let us know if you have any exciting tips for adding value to Christmas email.

You May be spamming and not know it!

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:04:45 +0000

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?

Ten Tips for Email Marketing

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:52:09 +0000

When you start to consider email as a means of marketing and reaching new prospects as well as strengthening the relationship you have with existing customers it is important to keep in mind some very important rules. Here are some of the critical things that you should consider when you begin.
1. Only send emails to people who have requested to receive them or to those who you have an existing relationship with. These might be prospects to whom you have sent information to or spoken to on the telephone or they may be existing customers or colleagues. The key is that they must know who you are and why you have contacted them.
2. Take every opportunity to build up your email list with valuable contacts, when someone makes an enquiry by telephone or in person, ask politely if you can add them to your list. Make sure members of your staff who come into contact with potential and existing customers get into the habit of asking for email addresses. Sign up forms on your website, feedback forms and competitions are other good ways of building your list.
3. Only include content which is relevant to the people you are sending to or to the product or service you are offering. The content should be benefiting the recipient of your emails in some way, either by making them aware of something to their advantage or telling them something of interest.
4. When you send your welcome email or perhaps even on your thank you page it is important to include a message like: “To ensure receipt of our emails, please add yourname@yourcompany.com to your Address Book.” This address will be the “from” email you are using and will improve your delivery rate by avoiding messages be directed into junk mail folders. It’s good practice to add this into your emails to make sure that your recipients are reminded to do it. By being added to their safe senders it will also mean that images are displayed in your emails.
5. Make the From Name for your messages either your company name or the name of a person at your company. Once you choose a From Name, keep it consistent. This will help people to recognise that this is a valid email as they quickly scan through their inbox.
6. If you are sending nicely formatted and illustrated HTML emails, make sure you also have a plain text version for those who can’t or don’t want to receive the full HTML version. With increasing numbers of people receiving emails on their mobiles a text only version may be more appealing to them.
7. Send emails at regular intervals if possible and not more often than is appropriate. If your emails have good quality content that the recipients find interesting and useful, they will look forward to your nest email and read it.
8. Timing can be important; in general it seems to be best to send business emails between Tuesday and Thursday and either just after the start of the day or just after lunch. For business emails, late afternoon or just before people leave the office is not such a good idea.
9. If your emails are going to consumers, then early evening may be a good time or perhaps on Fridays if you offer something which they might buy on the internet at the weekend. Much of the timing of your emails will depend on who your target is and their particular habits, but it’s important to consider this when you schedule your email sending.
10. Using lots of upper case text or exclamation marks within the subject line or body of your emails is a good way to aggravate spam filters and will result in your emails either being deleted or sent straight to a junk email folder.