Irrelevance is the new spam
In the email marketing industry, there is no greater sin than to be a spammer. No one seems to be one or know one, yet this unfortunate segment of “professionals” gives the rest of us a bad reputation.
With technology advancements, avoiding spam is becoming easier as filters become more clever. However, off-topic, noisy emails are becoming the latest nuisance to take away our concentration while dealing with our exploding inboxes.
Five ways to avoid irrelevance
- Let your users know exactly what they’re signing up for when they’re opting in: Is it a weekly or monthly email? What will it contain?
- Ask your users to confirm their interest: Make the sign-up a double opt-in, requiring users to click on a link you email them to confirm their address. This will give you a more responsive list, as your users will have made a very conscious decision to join. If you can’t or don’t want to do a double opt-in, at least send a confirmation email to those who sign up, thanking them for joining and reminding them of the topics, frequency, etc.
- Make a route plan: Choose ahead of time what topics you’ll cover and how. Remember what your users signed up for and keep on topic.
- Be consistent: If your topic, frequency of send or email style changes, tell your readers. If your readers see anything unexpected, they’re likely to jump to conclusions, forget they’ve ever signed up to your newsletter and unsubscribe, or worse, mark you as spam. If the new topics you cover are very different to the old ones, you might want to start a new list and ask your old list’s readers whether they’d like to join it. Give new readers the options when subscribing too.
- Make unsubscription easy: You can’t keep your readers hostage and, believe me, it’s better to have unsubscribed users than to have a growing number of users who flag you as spam. Dealing with ISPs and trying to convince them you aren’t a spammer after getting blacklisted is a nightmare and not a pretty place to be.
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