Bulk email marketing can be looked at from two perspectives: you are either a spammer by choice or you are spammer unknowingly. The difference between these two is quite blurred and in the eyes of most prospective customers that you want to serve, you would probably end up being a spammer anyway. This is the problem today with sending bulk emails: you have a huge hurdle of perception to overcome and it is not easy. Spammers have no compunctions of ensuring that the message that they want to propagate is spread far and wide with the lowest cost. This is the reason that they send bulk emails across the internet whether you want to hear what they say or not. This has invited the ire of legislators, ISPs, and mail users who sometimes wake up to more than a hundred mails on things that will have no consequence to their lives. A serious online marketer is someone that has to try and avoid falling into being categorized as a spammer. This requires nothing more than some savvy marketing and learning from the mistakes of spammers. There are three fundamental mistakes that spammers make that you must be sure to avoid in using a bulk email marketing campaign.
Advertise well: fundamentally, all spammers are really doing is advertising some product or the other on the internet. However, instead of being linked to a website, the medium of email is chosen. This is oddly where the disconnect happens because no spam mail has ever resembled an ad in design anyway. The reason for this is that when a spammer sends bulk email, he or she is aiming for zero cost and this is very clear in the designs of mails sent. Therefore, when sending bulk email, make your mails actually look like advertisements and not one-line post its. Take some time to design and fabricate your mailer before sending it out.
Be ethical: one of the main blunders that you can do is to acquire email addresses by enlisting the same methods that spammers use like using open relays or hijacking mail servers. It makes more sense and focuses your efforts if you get your clients to enroll or subscribe to your mailers. This is called opting-in. This practice also ensures that your mails are always welcome.
Follow rules: The CAN SPAM legislation of the US Government gave a free hand to most spammers if they followed some simple rules like giving the option of opting-out, did not use misleading headlines, and used proper communication channels. A bulk email marketing campaign may not specifically target the US market but this does not mean that it should not follow the same simple rules. According to the rules, you must also have an unsubscribe button. This gives the recipient the option of saying they no longer want to receive any mailings.
Sending bulk emails is not a difficult task and the efficacy of the process between following the guidelines until you begin to send bulk emails is guaranteed.
Sending Bulk Email the Wrong Way: 3 Blunders
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About the Author:
Karrie Beth is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email ( http://www.benchmarkemail.com ), a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service.
Author: Karrie Beth
