The 411 on E-Mail
E-mail can be used in every step of the marketing process, from driving traffic and building brands, to customer service and marketing special offers. Take a look at almost every commercial content or e-commerce site on the Web, and you'll find they all collect email addresses and send out e-newsletters.
While placing an email ad in a newsletter or buying an opt-in email list may go a long way toward customer acquisition, the work of email marketing is not done once you get the traffic. Now its time to get the email address of that visitor and let the post-acquisition phase of marketing by email take over.
Use your newsletter to promote new features, updates, new product offerings. Beyond the basic information-sharing function of a newsletter lies its branding effect. Every day, week, month, or whatever the frequency of the newsletter, that visitor that once made the trip to your Web site gets a reminder delivered right to his or her inbox that you are still there.
Of course, the work of sending email is getting harder. Scrupulous opt-in and list cleanliness practices are absolutely mandatory in the post CAN-SPAM Act environment.
CAN-SPAM, signed into Federal law in January 2004, mandates Internet-based opt-out. It doesn't require emailers to use any specific method for this, just that the option be available and operable for 30 days after the message is sent. The expectation is recipients will more actively use an unsubscribe option than press the delete button, filter the message, or report a message as spam. CAN-SPAM holds advertisers liable, along with all parties involved in sending email.
E-mailers can manage delivery outside of being whitelisted or having strong ISP relationships. Manage expectations through the acquisition and confirmation process; consider regular reconfirmation; offer frequency preferences or test for frequency optimization; maintain message consistency; and provide the best permission and suppression description as possible in headers and footers. Equally important are proper processing and management of bounce replies.
Parts of this story were drawn from the articles "CAN-SPAM: The Reality" by Paul Soltoff and "A Big, Big Year for E-Mail" by Ben Isaacson.
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