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Thursday, March 16, 2006

Email campaigns as advertising, do's and don'ts

The great thing about the internet and electronic advertising is it has the power to give people a look at your business like no other medium. The bad thing is if it is done wrong it can hurt you more than help you.

Here are some pointers on what not to do. Do not spam people with email. You don’t like it and neither does anyone else. Not only can this ruin your business reputation it can get your email banned from many different spam organizations today. We’ve had several clients that have been “Black Listed” by a number of different services. It can be time consuming and expensive to get yourself removed from the Black Lists. To see if your website email is Black Listed visit http://www.dnsstuff.com. Insert your domain name if you don’t know your I.P. address and scan the results for Red color bars. One may not hurt you. Multiple red bars are cause for concern. However, one red listing from a large spam house can do you great harm.

When you do send out group emails always have a remove feature. Either a link to automatically remove the email from a list or a simple “Reply with Remove in the subject line to be removed from this mailing list” should work. Warning: Many companies like AOL now provide their users with a “Report as SPAM” link in their mail browser. Many people will report you as a spammer instead of using your Remove feature. There is no guarantee that people will not mark you as a spammer when you are innocent of wrong doing.

You can alternately use a Newsletter service. We offer newsletter services that include all the compliant features for SPAM. In addition your personal email will not be affected if someone marks you as a spammer. The cost for these services varies based on the number of emails you want to send, graphic design work for the newsletter and the urgency of your request. The strength of doing things this way is most systems can tell you how many people opened and read your newsletter, if the reader clicked a link and where they went after that. In addition it can tell you if the person forwards it to a friend or opens it later for a second look.