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Email Marketing — If It Ain’t Useful, It’s Spam
A friend recently told me that her email inbox was becoming almost unusable. She explained that she was receiving so much spam that “important” messages were being lost amongst the constant barrage of sales pitches and phishing scams.
As an email marketing professional, I offered to help her regain control of her inbox and weed out all the spam. However, on closer inspection, I found very little spam. Yes, her email was stuffed with commercial email marketing messages, but very few of them were spam. In fact, she had given her full consent to receive the majority of the messages in her inbox (as it should be).
Her problem wasn’t spam. It was just that she no longer found the offers she received in her inbox (including a ridiculous number of daily deals) very interesting, and so these messages would pile up.
Here’s the thing. Most people (e.g., your customers) often don’t recognize the difference between spam and proper permission-based email. They just see what is useful and what is not useful (with the latter being labeled as “spam”).
As a marketer, it’s your job to make your email campaigns as useful as possible. This means getting to know your list, creating offers with considerable value to your subscribers, and never being boring or sending emails out of habit or in a vain attempt to drive up numbers as the month or quarter ticks by.
If your emails aren’t useful, you risk falling into the same category (in the eyes of your customers) as a spammer. To avoid this fate, always put your customer first when planning a campaign and ask yourself: Will my subscribers find this useful?
This post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog.
