Your First Email Campaign – No Spam
I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.
There are some important rules for starting any email campaign
No Spam
You might think that “No Spam” is all about yesterdays post. That if you only have a opt-in mailing list you provide an method to opt-out and you have your name and contact information in your newsletters that you are not sending Spam and technically you are correct. I have a bigger definition of Spam. I believe that if I sign up to receive a newsletter and it is all ads and promotional material with no other good information it’s still junk even if I asked to receive it.
Unfortunately many site owners just want to know what’s the easiest and cheapest way that they can “blast” their advertisements to as many people as possible.
It’s important to remember here that your subscribers are guests of your site who were looking to see what you can do for them. They are hoping that you will provide them a way to make their life easier or maybe just to entertain them a bit. If you do that they will allow you to promote yourself and possibly even help you, but if all you send is advertising it will be ignored and what could have been your most valuable resource will simply unsubscribe or block your mail.
It is also true that in these days of email filters more and more email is being blocked and deleted. Many times the sender doesn’t even know it. The more images that you include in your newsletter the more it looks like spam to the filters.
In addition did you know that most major online email clients (Yahoo, Google, Hotmail) will block your images by default? The best way to get your message through to your readers is to not look like Spam. Just a few pictures and lots of text. Have good descriptive alternate text to describe your images so readers will know what the pictures are if they can’t see them. Be sure to provide a plain text version of your email to users who can’t get html email and provide a link to a page on your site where the reader can go if the email is unreadable.
The main thing that I want to stress in this post is that you don’t get to decide if your email campaign is spam or not, the folks on the receiving end get to decide that. Don’t give them an excuse to block your mail.
Tomorrow – Post your old newsletters
