5 Common Questions about Effective Email Marketing
No one can dispute the fact that email has become our favorite way to put out marketing messages. And rightfully so. It is easy, convenient, and inexpensive. You can use a service to track who saw your message, and you can hit multiple targets at once. However, small businesses and sales people are still struggling with email marketing. Why? Reasons range from message effectiveness to a sender’s email address getting blacklisted. Here, Infofree.com will attempt to give you some guidelines for email marketing best practices to help increase the number of people who see your messages.
1. How many emails can I send at once without being labeled as a “spammer”?
The answer to this question is simple – very simple. One. To be safe, we recommend that you send no more than one email at a time in order to avoid being labeled a spammer. Infofree.com provides email addresses so that you, the user, can add that follow up element to your sales process. What that means is, it is in your best interest to call before you ever send an email. Even if you leave a voicemail as your first contact, it will still give your email some context.
2. What does it mean to be labeled as a spammer, and can it have an impact on my business?
Many email providers have a spam blocking feature that will blacklist IP and email addresses if it’s determined that they are sending too many marketing emails at once to people who have not asked to receive them. This can affect more than just your marketing emails. If your address is blacklisted, you may not be able to get your emails delivered at all. So even the legitimate emails – say, to confirm an existing appointment – will not be received.
However, if you insist on using the email addresses that Infofree.com provides for a mass email campaign, be advised that you must adhere to the rules set forth in the CAN-SPAM Act. While there are multiple guidelines, the most important ones are including a valid physical postal address and a link for unsubscribing. Your physical postal address can be your business’s street address, a P.O. Box, or a registered private mailbox, but it must be included somewhere in your marketing email. When it comes to the unsubscribe link, it just has to be there. To make it clear how recipients can opt out of your emails, Infofree.com suggests using a different font or color. For more information on the CAN-SPAM laws and how to abide by them, click here.
3. How can I personalize my message?
Personalizing your message is the best way to ensure you get a response. That should not be a problem if you are sending them one at a time. You can still use a template, or copy and paste. Just leave yourself some room to make your customer or prospect feel like they matter. Some easy ways to do this are: using the person’s name, including their business’s name, and asking questions about their industry. Surely you have heard the adage that you have two ears and only one mouth for a reason. Apply that rule to your email marketing campaign too.
4. What is the accuracy of Infofree.com’s email addresses?
When sending emails using Infofree.com’s email address database, our customers typically have 60% to 80% of the emails successfully delivered. The remaining emails “bounce,” which means they did not deliver. An email can bounce for several reasons. One common reason is that the email address is no longer valid. Since companies and individuals are constantly changing their email addresses, there is a high turnover. An email can also bounce due to the corporate blocking of email addresses. Going back to the first point of this article, if you are sending one email at a time, you will have more emails delivered to the intended recipients since your emails are less likely to be blocked or caught in a spam filter. And you can update the email addresses after exporting your prospect’s to Infofree.com’s CRM101 – all of those fields are editable.
5. Is there an email marketing service you would recommend?
The email addresses you receive from Infofree.com are not opted-in, which means that those recipients have not signed up to receive emails from you. Unfortunately, that means any mass emailing you attempt to do will likely go into a spam folder. So most mass email services (MailChimp or JangoMail, for example) will not accept them. Those services consider themselves to be aimed at customer retention email marketing. However, you can use Clickback.com. They will accept email addresses that are not opted-in because they are a customer acquisition email marketing service.
Hopefully these answers will help you craft an email marketing campaign that grows your sales. To attend a webinar hosted by Infofree.com about email marketing, click here: www.infofree.com/webinar. What are some guidelines you adhere to for email marketing?
