You’ve got their permission to market…now what?
Jerry L. Kennedy | TLT Social Media Marketing June 2013
Follow these basic rules and be amazed by how quickly you get results.
Reserve your email deliveries for news stories, special offers and articles that are relevant to your audience.
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IF YOU’VE BEEN FOLLOWING ALONG and, better yet, putting the advice in this column into practice, you’ve probably got a healthy list of prospects who have provided you with their email addresses and permission to keep in touch with regular updates. Fantastic! Of course, this leads to the next question: What to do with those email addresses?
Simply put, you want to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing messages and minimize the annoyance factor of sending those messages. The good news is that it’s easier than it sounds, provided you follow a few basic rules.
1. Resist the temptation to become an obnoxious spammer. Just because your prospects have entrusted you with their email addresses doesn’t mean you have permission to flood their inboxes with every thought, joke or, heaven forbid, political statement that crosses your desk. The relationship is a sacred one, and if you break that trust your online marketing efforts are doomed to failure and you might as well go back to advertising in the Yellow Pages. Reserve your email deliveries for news stories, special offers and articles that are relevant to your audience.
2. Use an email delivery service like MailChimp. I know a lot of you are probably used to using the “bcc” function in Outlook to send out mass emails. Stop it. No, really. Stop now. I don’t want to alarm you, but you’re actually breaking the law when you do that. To be in compliance, the folks you’re sending email to must have opted into your list and you must provide them an easy, single- click method to opt out of the list (i.e., unsubscribe).
If you use the old bcc method, your company’s email servers could get blacklisted. Trust me, you don’t want that to happen. Just ask your IT department.
There are a ton of providers for this kind of email delivery service. I recommend MailChimp because it’s dead simple to use and it’s free to use for lists of up to 2,000 subscribers. It’s the perfect system to cut your teeth on as you continue to build your list. You can sign up in about five minutes at
http://mailchimp.com.
3. Don’t purchase email lists! If you’ve ever received an unsolicited email from a company you’ve never requested to hear from, done business with or ever even heard of, that company most likely bought your name and email address from a marketing company. You know how annoying those emails are, right? So why would you intentionally do that to someone else, especially someone you’d like to eventually do business with? Buying email lists is bad for your online reputation. Build your email list organically by being an authoritative source of great content in your industry.
4. Don’t use your AOL email address as your “reply-to” address. I know it’s hard to believe, but I still see business people using their personal AOL, Yahoo and Gmail addresses as their default email address for business contacts. Seriously. Why would you do that when you can buy a domain name for $15 a year or less? Buy a domain name for your business and send email correspondence from and to an email address at that domain.
5. Pay attention to the results. In addition to helping you comply with antispam laws, email delivery service providers like MailChimp provide detailed reports of the effectiveness of your campaigns. They’ll tell you how many of your emails were delivered, how many were opened, how many people unsubscribed or reported the email as spam and how many people clicked on the links in your email. Don’t ignore this information; study it and use it to learn what’s working and what isn’t, then do more of the former and less of the latter.
Email marketing is still alive and well and can be an effective way to keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Follow the simple rules listed above and you’ll see results sooner than you’d expect.
As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments. Thanks for reading!
Jerry Kennedy earned his stripes as an operations and sales manager in the lubricants industry. He is currently the co-founder of CDK Creative, a digital marketing agency that brings his real-world sales and operations experience to the world of online marketing. Learn more or request a consultation at http://cdkcreative.com.
Email him at jerry@jerrykennedy.com.