Permissions-based Email Marketing

By Author: Shannon Lindsey
Total Articles: 223
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When it comes to sending out an email newsletter or discussing opt-in email marketing, it seems that there is a lot of focus on permission. Permission to send your newsletters may seem obvious to some, especially when they are sending to a pre-existing contact list, but think again if you assume you can just figure each of your contacts to be interested in receiving an email newsletter. If your email program automatically adds those you exchange emails with to your address book, you might have a fairly disparate collection of people in your address book, from the customer service rep you worked with from a shipping center to the IT guy you emailed about your call forwarding problems to a former client. None of these people have signed up, literally or figuratively, for email marketing communications from you. And, if you think it might not bother them to find themselves on your list, why don't you click over to your spam box and see how forgiving you feel about all that unwanted email. Or, better yet, imagine your email experience some years back when spam filters weren't quite as advanced and you always ended up with a bunch ...
... of spam in your inbox and legitimate mail in your spam folder. It was an onerous task to sort through and you made liberal use of the "spam" button, even though you knew it was unlikely that spam senders were ever using the same emails twice.

Today, some people treat anything that they don't want in their inbox as spam. It might be communications that they signed up to receive, in fact, but if they've forgotten that, or they don't happen to see an easy way to unsubscribe, they get rid of it in the best way they know how. Should that happen to you, however, it isn't just a reader lost. There are very real consequences to being marked as spam. You risk becoming a black-listed sender, unable to send out email newsletters that arrive in the inboxes of your intended recipients. Now, if you have your own system for sending out batch emails, then you're dealing with an in-house problem. No fun, but it's yours to deal with. Most of the people working with email newsletter software, however, are using a third party to send out their newsletters. If they damage that company's ability to send out emails, many more people are affected. While this may not ripple back to you beyond your own inability to send emails, it will certainly damage your ability to do business with that sender, as you have cost them not only their ability to send your emails, but their ability to send anyone's emails!
Email marketing is a communication tool that allows you to develop strong relationships through sending out an email newsletter to your readers. MyNewsletterBuilder can help you build a strong, thriving opt-in email marketing campaign.