Email Marketing Ethics: Doing Things The Right Way

email_marketing_ethics

Email marketing is an effective communication tool to reach out and maintain relationship with your existing and potential customers. Studies indicate that $1 investment in email marketing can yield up to $44 return. Positive brand image, improved credibility, strong relationship, and sales growth are few advantages that can be obtained by optimized email campaigns. However, in many customer circles, email marketing is taken as just another way of spamming. Be that as it may, overzealous internet marketing can have the inverse impact if not executed rightfully. Therefore smart marketers always encourage professionalism and ethics in doing business.

This is the reason strategist endorse the importance of abiding by ethics during email marketing campaigns. Ethical email marketing is the process of sending emails to your prospective clients to help them to reach what they want and in doing so, help you reach yours. Every client needs to give you permission to mail to them. The following 5 tips will help you ensure ethics in your campaigns.

1. Consistent Branding:

Whenever it comes to branding, consistency is the key to success. In email marketing, your messages should be consistent with your brand in terms of layout and design. How often have you received an email marketing message that doesn’t have the same look, feel and consistency with the brand from which you got the message? It’s usually ignored as businesses will rush into email marketing without understanding that this is simply one more approach to deliver your brand message.

While your email messages don’t need to look precisely like your Website, they must anyhow include your logo, slogan and be styled properly for a solid match with your current online identity. If you aspire that people don’t reject your emails, this consistency is important as it’ll send a message of credibility and something of value. Your email format should be customized and a clearer representative of your brand.

2. Formation of Email Lists:

Email marketing can possibly help boost your business in a great way. Having understood the potential, people and also organizations are attracted to pump emails to large numbers without noticing the credibility of those mail addresses. One must never be lured of this shortcut way for success. Rather than taking advantage through email marketing, your email address may be blocked or noted as a spam mail ID or your domain might by blocked by search engines after finding spamming activities carried out with your mail ID.

Buying or selling email list is a controversial issue. The best approach is to invest time and effort to create email lists yourself. After consent from online visitors for the email subscription is critical. Your marketing intelligence system should track your website visitors, and newsletter subscribers and allow you to have a custom email list. Another advantage of own list is it being responsive and effective.

3: Following the Schedule- Allow Predictability

It doesn’t make a difference if you send a weekly, monthly or a quarterly email newsletter. Having a predictable schedule will assist readers to anticipate communication from you. People usually don’t unsubscribe from your lists when they expect communication from you on a specific day of the week or month. While your readers may not read every single of your newsletter, they know they can get the next one as it will come right on schedule. If your schedule is unusual, so too will be your results. Special announcements or promotions outside of your regular timetable schedule be utilized to get extra attention. However, it’s recommended not to bombard people with information and promotions as it’ll lead to opt-out or un-subscription.

4. Deliver Something  that Adds Value:

Monthly newsletters are an excellent venue for telling existing and future clients about what’s going ahead within your company and informing them of upcoming occasions, promotions, and discounts. It’s a way to stay in touch. However, if you don’t deliver some value in the same and provide worth-reading stuff, people will start ignoring emails from your system. You can send out promos, latest industry publications, your blog posts, e-books or any other interesting piece of information. If you think about the client’s necessities and give them content of substance, your efforts won’t go unnoticed. Readers will stay subscribed and refer your newsletter to others.

5. Allow Opt-in and Opt-out:

Users should have free option to subscribe and unsubscribe from getting emails. This is one of the agreed upon best practices of email marketing. Opt-in can be checked at two levels. After registering their name and email address on your website or blog site, user should confirm the subscription through the email verification. Double checking user authenticity through email verification helps you know that you are sending emails to the right party. Similarly, you can comprehend that the email is not subscribed by third party without the knowledge of the actual owner of the email ID.

Users should have choice to unsubscribe from your emails at their expediency. You should honor the commitment by not sending a single email after user sends consent to not receive any more mails from you.

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Tahir Akbar

Tahir Akbar is Digital Marketing Manager at Makesbridge. He loves to write about digital strategy & trends, email marketing, industry best practices, and management. He tweets at @tahirakbr