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Spam is the biggest threat to legitimate marketers. Here’s the extravision guide on how not to spam…
According to a recent report, ‘Marketing and Branding Forecast: Online Advertising and Email Marketing through 2007’ published by Jupiter Research the average consumer will eventually be bombarded by more than 3900 spam email messages annually. Whether or not this is a realistic forecast there is no doubt that junk email is increasing. At extravision we are actively opposed to spam - it is a thorn in the side of every responsible email marketer. Many companies we talk to are often somewhat reticent about email marketing for fear that they may be perceived as spammers. In fact there are clear distinctions between spam and a genuine marketing campaign, here’s our guide to legitimate email marketing – that gets great results...
Successful email marketing takes careful thought and planning. It does not consist of hastily drawn up messages blitzed to an enormous list of addresses garnered from a broker but instead must be targeted to a carefully selected audience with a message that is highly personalised and focused. With attention to the following areas your campaign will not only differentiate itself from spam but also attract a great response.
Target & Segment
Spammers use underhand methods to harvest millions of email addresses without a care for whether the recipients have any demonstrable interest in the product they are trying to sell. They blast messages to these addresses in the hope that a small percentage will be gullible enough to be respond. A responsible campaign starts by a planning process that includes careful targeting and list building.
In our experience, by far the best responses are obtained by using an in-house list. After all, your customers already know you and you can probably find a reason to contact them again very easily.
If you don’t have email addresses for your in-house contacts don’t worry. The easiest way to get them is run a telemarketing campaign, this also gives you a great opportunity to gain their permission. Getting permission from ‘gatekeepers’ (admin staff or secretaries) may seem like a time consuming exercise but it’s the ideal way both to make sure that the addresses are accurate and to prepare expectations for your email.
If you are looking for a brand new contact list, beware - buying in an list of email addresses may seem like a highly attractive short-cut, but it’s highly likely that these lists have been plundered by other companies, including a few spammers. The response level of such lists is low, many addresses will be out of date and those that are still in use will already have been bombarded with unsolicited emails. The best strategy is to purchase a highly targeted telemarketing list without email addresses and call for email addresses; this will ensure that the list has not been overused or spammed
Once you’ve built your list, the time has come to take a closer look at the customers on it to evaluate their needs. No matter what product and/or service you sell there will be a number of ‘categories’ your customers will fit into. For example, high/low volume orders, recent customers/customers who have not bought from you within the last six month and so on and so forth. The more you can segment the customer base the more relevant you can make the email message – and the more relevant the message the better the response will be.
Personalise
When crafting the message there are few pointers to avoid it sounding like spam..
Although free offers can be a great call to action they are also a common trick used in spam, it may be best to avoid this technique, at least until your email relationship with your customers is well established and a level of trust has been built up.
The key to avoiding appearing to spam is to make the message as personal as possible - if you can, include some past history about your relationship within the email, for example. Personalised messages get a much higher response rate for a number of reasons – not least of which is that a spammer would not have the time or respect to bother to do so. Using all the available data you have about your customer to make the message as personal and as relevant as possible is probably the single biggest weapon you have in your arsenal.
Keep data clean
However accurate the addresses on your list are there are bound to be a number of un-subscribes and bounces to deal with. Prepare for this in advance, using an automated response management system will save time and effort here. Keeping your data clean not only ensures that you are sending email only to those people who want to receive it but will also differentiate you from spammers, who care little for un-subscribe requests. In fact they often use these as confirmation that an address is live and will bombard it with even more messages. Responsible email marketing is about forging stronger relationships with clients –it’s essential that un-subscribe requests are actioned immediately. Remember many people dip in and out of mailing lists and newsletters all the time so don’t think that an unsubscribe request necessarily means you have lost them forever. Updating email addresses from bounces is also extremely important. You really don’t want to be sending emails to old customers who have a left a company, or even worse, passed away.
Timing and frequency
An important part of maintaining a positive email relationship is knowing what the boundaries are when it comes to frequency of contact. Spammers don’t care how often people receive their messages, you should. About once a month/every 6 weeks is about right for a newsletter. Too little contact can however potentially be as damaging as too much. If you only contact your customers once a year they are likely to forget who you are and that they have given you permission to talk to them. They are therefore likely to perceive the odd email, out of the blue as spam, as much as one that appears every day.
Summary
There is little doubt that, despite efforts to control it, spam is here to stay. Making sure that your email marketing campaigns carry the clear hallmark of a genuine effort to interact with your customers is becoming increasingly important. Following our advice should help your emails stand out from the crowd and get the results you require. | 
