Permission Based Email Marketing: Who can you email?
The first thing any company or individual must do before they send out an email campaign, is make sure they have permission to send the email to the intended recipients. To make sure we all understand what is meant by permission, here is a quick overview of who you can and cannot send emails too.
Who you CAN send Email Campaigns to:
- Subscription through online sign up forms.
This is the quickest and by far the easiest. You can easily add a form on your website that allows a person browsing your site to enter their details into your InTouch account. You can add a check box which requests the user to sign up to receive regular emails. If you want help on how this is achieved, please contact us today. - Subscription though offline Sales & Marketing forms.
During the course of a sale or through any marketing campaign you may have completed. If you have asked for feedback, make sure there is a field for the user to put their email address down along with a check box that asks if they would like to receive regular updates. Remember to keep this completed form for reference in the future. Although your allowed to communicate with anyone you have made a sale with, it is always best to make sure they know they are going to receive something from you. - People you have given their business card and agreed to receive email communications.
Think of this scenario, you meet a potential client (or existing) at an event. You exchange business cards and you ask if it is ok to send them regular updates via email. They are happy and agree to this. Whilst this is fine, please make sure you email them before any campaign is sent, just to remind them they have opted in and how they can unsubscribe if they so desire. This is to stop any confusion.
Who you CANNOT send Email Campaigns to:
- Purchased or rented lists.
This is a very common question we receive at CRM. Simple rule is, if you have purchased/rented a list from a third party, you do not have permission to send emails to anyone on that list! Sending campaigns to a list that has been purchased or rented is the best and quickest way to ruin your company/brands email reputation. No matter on what the claims of the source our, we will not allow this. - Email address scrapped from websites.
You have just spent weeks and weeks trawling the internet for potential customers and have generated an impressive list. But, I'm afraid to say that the hard work is to no avail. As with purchased or rented lists, you do not have permission to send them an email. - Old email addresses.
Another mistake companies regularly make is to send a campaign to all the contacts they have generated over the past 7 years. Our rule is, anything older than two years should be removed. The reason is simple, people move and change and sending an email to a customer after 5 years of silence sometimes doesn't go down very well. Also, they may have changed their email address and you'll generate a high bounce rate. In ISP terms, this is acting like a spammer would, so chances are you'll be blocked.
We at CRM have turned many potential clients because we feel so strongly about permission based email marketing. We all know too well how annoying it is to receive emails from people about increasing the size of your whatsit, or about miracle weight loss programs and all that, can you tell which option they used above to get your email?
