You may have setup a couple sign up forms in your web site to encourage people to receive your email newsletters and promotions. You want to use email technology because it is cheaper, more efficient and you can track the results better than with traditional marketing channels.
For reasons beyond your control the total subscribers maybe low, you want to take advantage of an email campaign and reach as many people as possible so you do a quick search for ‘list buying/renting’ and in a matter of minutes you’ve got yourself 10,000 plus new subscribers! You send your email campaign and the results are not near what you thought they would be. Even worse, you noticed that a major ISP (Comcast, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) bounced a significant portion of your subscribers emails.
What happened is that when you made the decision to purchase a list you probably bought it from an unreliable source that told you that the records where opt in. But did they explain to you how their opt in system works? Did they show you where in their process they tell subscribers that their information will be sold? Most likely not. The truth is that buying list doesn’t help your cause; it actually hurts your reputation and ISPs won’t deliver emails to inboxes from non-trusted senders. The ISPs know you are a not a trusted sender when they see complaint rates going up and surprisingly it doesn’t take more than a handful of complaints to become part of the dreaded blacklists.
Obviously the best case scenario is to not buy a list to begin with, but since this practice is becoming more and more popular, you should know what to do to clean your list and make sure you become white listed from the ISPs. It is simple and it will help building a customer relationship with this new subscribers:
- Always honor unsubscribe request as soon as possible. It is better to have unsubscribed request than have you subscribers clicking the spam button in their email client.
- Remember to have the name of your company in the FROM line as well as the subject line, it helps recipients to identify who you are right away.
- Let the recipient feel like they are in control and allow them to tell you how often and what type of information they would like to receive from you.
- Remind subscribers how you got their email: such as from sign up forms in your website or through a “partner” that you purchased the list from.
- Send frequency plays an important roll when building your reputation. Establish an email campaign that goes out in a timely and consistent manner.
Your reputation is important to have a successful email campaign. Test and find the balance between what works and what doesn’t for your company. Keep your subscribers happy by sending them relevant information in a timely manner, but most important your subscribers must have given you unambiguous consent to contact them through email, and even then you should expect complaints because people often forget when, where, why they subscribe.
