Civilized Email Marketing
Back in the wild days of the Internet’s early existence, mass emails could be sent to anyone at any time. These glory days for spammers were nothing but trouble for those of us on the receiving end.
Once the spammers found you, there was no way to get off their recipient list. In fact, clicking “unsubscribe” often served only to confirm that your email address was active. A person’s only defense was to change email addresses every couple of years in a sisyphean attempt to stay ahead of the spammers.
Thankfully, those days are long gone. In 2003 the government passed the CAN-SPAM Act setting standards for mass emails. While disreputable emailers are still out there, technology has evolved, many major spam networks have been eliminated and major email solutions such as Gmail and Hotmail have developed methods to filter Spam out of incoming messages.
As an entrepreneur looking to promote your business, it is important to know what the rules are. Breaking them can violate your hosting company’s policies, land you on a black list, and bounce your emails (spam or not) back to you as quickly as you send them out.
The rules are fairly simple. You have to give people a legitimate option to unsubscribe. You must use relevant (not misleading) subject lines. You cannot email people at random – they must sign up to receive emails from you or have a prior existing business relationship. And you cannot send out bulk emails from a traditional SMTP server. This is where email marketing companies become absolutely vital.
Email marketing companies such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, or iContact are designed so that all emails sent through them adhere to the CAN-SPAM act. By using an email marketing service you ensure that your emails adhere to the law, that they don’t end up in spam filters, and that you, as a reputable individual, don’t find yourself on any black lists.
Of course, that’s not all they do. Most email marketing companies also provide other highly useful services. They provide a space to store and manage your emails, and ensure that duplicate email addresses are automatically weeded out. They allow you to customize the look of your emails so that they are branded with your company’s logo and color scheme. They also provide detailed analytic reports on the emails that you send out so that you can see who opened your email, who clicked on the links it contained, who unsubscribed, and more. Finally, they provide all the technology required for legal compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act.
And the whole shebang is quite affordable, even for small businesses just getting started. Most services determine their charges based on how many people you email, and/or how often. Tripepi Smith prefers to use Constant Contact for it’s email marketing. The pricing is highly competitive (starting at just $15 a month for up to 500 email addresses), and includes as many individual emails as a client wants to send.
There’s little nostalgia for the unruly early days of email marketing. It’s nice to know that when they say “unsubscribe by clicking here” they mean it.