As any person or business gets involved in email marketing, they reach a point of excitement that generates dozens of ideas of how to gather more emails. Stop! Before you get too creative with your ideas, we want to highlight one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, issue in email marketing.
Numero Uno Mistake: You didn’t ask them for permission
This is the number 1 mistake a new email marketing campaign commits. Permission isn’t received from the recipients. The days of interruption marketing are disappearing, if not already gone, and the days of permission marketing are taking over. Before you do any other work like creating the content or constructing a strategy, make certain you have decent sized email list that you have permission from. Trust us when we say, get permission!
We’ve had numerous clients, that only use either our design or content service instead of our full email management service, ask us why they are receiving spam complaints. After we conduct our how, where and when questions of their list, it’s clear that they didn’t ask for permission 9 out of 10 times. To increase your deliverability, avoid any legal complications and spam complaints, and while increasing click results – ask for PERMISSION!
Before we forget to mention it, it’s not only rude and annoying, it’s also against the law – CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 sets the rules for email marketing.
For those of you that already have a list and are interested in cleaning it up, view our Red Flags of Bad Email Lists.