Customer Acquisition Marketing through email: Avoid the Spam Folder
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Customer acquisition marketing is the process of identifying, approaching and fostering new customer relationships. Whether you are the Coca-Cola Company or simply selling your handcrafted garden gnomes, you need leads in order to gain profit. Lead generation can use many different customer acquisition strategies; the newest is the World Wide Web.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) states that online lead generation is the fastest growing category in online ad spending. The internet is a vast universe full of opportunities for marketers—blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, directories and the trickiest one: email. Email is, in theory, a great way to reach your target audience. However, there is a one huge concept to fear…the e-marketing graveyard…the spam folder.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) states that online lead generation is the fastest growing category in online ad spending. The internet is a vast universe full of opportunities for marketers—blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, directories and the trickiest one: email. Email is, in theory, a great way to reach your target audience. However, there is a one huge concept to fear…the e-marketing graveyard…the spam folder.
What is spam?
We’ve all seen them, and possibly cursed them under our breaths; they are spam emails. Spam refers to any unwanted, unproductive and unethical activity done over the internet. 13 billion spam emails are sent everyday and any email user will receive approximately 3000 spam emails per year, how annoying! Email carriers have cleverly learned to create spam folders where users can mark messages as spam or sometimes the folder will even auto-detect messages that appear to be spam. This is a great tool… for actual spam at least. But when you’re using email as a customer acquisition strategy, it’s your worst nightmare! Not all unfamiliar emails are from future African princes that need money wired to them now or a stay-at-home mom that made $70,000 from home last year, and I can teach you how to distinguish yourself from the spammers.
Why use email marketing?
If there’s a big chance of being marked as spam and ignored, why use email marketing? Well, because it can be worth it. Some of the top marketers have gained 40% conversion rates using opt-in (which I will discuss later) email customer acquisition marketing. Also, close to four million people have an email account and 47% check it daily. That’s a huge number of inboxes your company’s information could end up in, now you just have to make sure not to end up marked as spam.
Why you should avoid the spam folder
63% of email users have never checked their spam folders. If your genuine newsletter or promotion ends up in there, you might as well consider it dead and buried. Not only will no one really see it, but once a single email from your company is marked as spam, it could cause your company’s email addresses to be blocked by a lot email service providers. Your site can be blocked by the search engines too, making it impossible for leads to see not just your e-mail, but your site completely!
Now, no one will see your e-mail, your company’s reputation is bruised, and no one can search for your site. You may think that’s the worst that can happen, but even the government can get involved. The CAN-SPAM law (Federal Senate Bill 877) was signed by George Bush in December 2003. Although this law has done little to minimize spam, any company using email marketing solutions that receives a 0.5% or more of their total sent messages as spam complaints will suffer serious deliverability penalties, and you don’t want that.
How to not be a spammer
First of all, you need to learn the difference between unsolicited email and solicited email (also known as opt-in email). Any message where the recipient has not agreed to receive the message is considered an unsolicited email, aka spam. To be a solicited email, make sure to have a registration form, email/mailing list, or something along those lines and send out your message soon after the user registers, so they won’t forget who your company is. Once you have a solicited emailing list, the law makes you do a few things:
--Make sure there is a way to opt-out permanently from the emailing list.
--Only contact people who requested information by signing up, logging in, etc.
--Include your physical street address so they know who your company is and can contact you.
--Your message needs to be marked as an advertisement or ad in the subject line or the first few lines of body (I would recommend putting it in the body).
--Sexually orientated emails need to be clearly marked in the subject line.
--Make sure there is a way to opt-out permanently from the emailing list.
--Only contact people who requested information by signing up, logging in, etc.
--Include your physical street address so they know who your company is and can contact you.
--Your message needs to be marked as an advertisement or ad in the subject line or the first few lines of body (I would recommend putting it in the body).
--Sexually orientated emails need to be clearly marked in the subject line.
Good luck!
I hope you enjoyed these tips on how to do customer acquisition marketing through email without ending up in the dreaded spam folder. Email marketing is a great customer acquisition strategy and good luck to everyone who tries it!
Special Thanks... a special thanks to Abby Barsky for today's guest blog post, and expert in customer acquisition strategy.
Marketing Blog founder and top-selling author Michael Fleischner has been featured on The TODAY Show, ABC World News, and Bloomerg Radio. 
25 comments :
this is awesome!
Good advice, but I suggest a follow-up on message content. That is, the answer to the question of "how not to be a spammer" is fairly simple: don't send spam.
The content of the message must be of value to the recipient, even if they're not in the market to buy right away, or the user will flag it as spam. Messages flagged as spam are used to train filters that assess all future messages and shunt them directly to the spam folder (or the trash).
One "bad" message probably won't kill you (though it might for a few users who are especially annoyed by spammers), but if 50% or 75% of the messages a company sends are poorly targeted and poorly composed, the filters will block any future message you send. Your e-mail address and possibly even any mail from your domain (whatever@yourcompany.com) will be flagged as spam
And once you've been labeled a spammer, it's quite possibly forever. Filters are unforgiving, and users aren't known to regularly review the content of spam folders and un-block messages - so it's critical to get it right, every message you send.
I do have emails and several of them...and I do checked the titles in the spam folders coz sometimes email get lost in the part...thanks for this article
I Would also recommend using SRS as an email resource. they are the leading email list provider and have an extensive email lists for most organizations. Not sure I agree with your comment re: over 60% of spam not being checked, how does one come up with that statistic?
Great article, thanks for sharing!
Generally good advice, but I find it hard to believe that only 4 million people have an email account. Maybe it's a typo because I would suspect the number of email accounts numbers in the billions.
Good article!! email marketing is kinda risky yet it maybe effective way since your dealing directly..
Jake Smith
Great article on email marketing. But I still believe Facebook have an edge over email marketing.
Why???
You know its easier to add friends than to make a person like your page. You could use a simple 6 step method to make bulk friend request together. Check out Mass Facebook Adder for that. Its so out of suspicion that there is no worry of account suspension. Very useful for blog promotion :)
Keep blogging good stuffs like this friend.
I just read your article and find it really great, so i could not stop myself to admire your writing skills, you really capture the readers and make them to read your stuff from very start till end.
For sharing such a awesome knowledge and your suggestion are really great about e-mail marketing,
There is no doubt that email marketing works.
If you have a targeted list then it is possible to get returns as high as 3-4%.
Pick a $100 product and send it to 15000 people with a 3% take up rate and you will make quite a bit of cash, from 1 email.
If you find a way to extract the most from the email, make it compelling, interactive, experiential.
Thank you for this post.
The only time I've ever really had a good result with email marketing is when I have a highly qualified list of users. These lists are really hard to find in the first place. the only real option is to build one up from scratch, don't waste time with buying data as most of time its a total load of rubbish... good post btw I'll point some of my padawans to it! (hope I spelt that right) ciao
Good piece. Using double opt-in will almost guarantee emails/ updates readership. I agree about using text format instead of html
Better be not a spammer or your hardships will be put into the trash. I must say, this technique is more efficient if they all responded to your mails.
We have had much success with E-Mail Marketing through HTML messages. To a certain extent we believe that it is the content of the HTML E-Mails which is the reason some may be flagged and others not.
The design elements included in many HTML messages are extremely cluttered and have too many different links with performance measurement algorithms attached to them - and consumers in today's environment aren't as stupid as they used to be; now people are catching on to when they are being marketed to.
On our company end we send E-Mails to our base of Experiential Marketing and Event Marketing clients and vendors and we design things with simplicity / creativity at the forefront in order to attract interest through innovation in design, rather than a selling-point through massive HTML links.
Brand competion and growth is largely about building two market based assets: physical availability and mental availability. Brands that are easier to buy - for more people, in more situations - have more market share. Innovation and differentiation (when they work) build market based assets, which last after competitors copy the innovation.
Great tips! Spam emails have been decreasing in the past few years (down almost 80% last year) but it is still easy for legitimate emails to pushed into a spam box. Becoming 'white-listed' is a good tool for companies who may be confused with spam as well.
Really Your Article is very good and helpful. i am very happy to read your article. Keep update I will return soon.
This is very informative! Do email safelists sites really work?
Brilliant post,Know I understand more why we shall need to practice email marketing so that we can have a quality content and will not be treat as a spammer.
Thanks for this insightful post. The info I have gained from your blog is truly encouraging! The subject is really interesting. Congratulations to the creator of the webblog!
Thanks for such an informative article. It really updated my knowledge. In today’s high tech environment we need to market products online to make them visible. It’s really very important from a SEO perspective.
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