Reducing complaints and increasing list responsiveness
Email marketers have a huge impact on whether their messages will be considered spam and may escalate into complaints and accusations.
With careful structuring of email marketing campaigns, marketers can significantly lower their unsubscribes, minimize their complaints and increase the responsiveness of their lists.
Below are several recommendations that I have found to be instrumental in achieving these goals.
When you confirm your subscriptions, you are doing the best possible thing to shield yourself against spam accusations.
It is important that your email marketing provider stores the important logs that can “prove your innocence”, should you ever receive a complaint. Such proof may include:
- subscription method (i.e. email subscription, web-form subscription, manual inclusion, list import)
- IP and time stamp of the original subscription request (i.e. a person who initially requested to be subscribed)
- IP and time stamp of the actual confirmation (i.e. a person who clicked on the confirmation link)
A reputable email marketing service provider will automatically archive the proof for you, and take care of the complaints on your behalf.
It should be noted that with the unconfirmed opt-in model you leave yourself vulnerable to attacks, joe-jobs and spam accusations.
By confirming your subscriptions you will have cleaner, more responsive lists that are more targeted, generate significantly less complaints and unsubscribes, and contrary to what the urban myth is — do not negatively impact sales.
2. Identify yourself in your email messages.
Many of the complaints are caused by the fact that the subscriber doesn’t recognize the sender and automatically assume that the email is spam.
You can combat this by adding clear information that identifies you and your company in the beginning of your message, and reminds your subscribers of who you are and what they signed up for.
When you do this, make sure that you don’t say “This email is NOT spam” — people will assume it is.
Instead, you could try something like:
- Hi Joe, You have signed up for my free email course
“How to make your parrots talk” a week ago
at my site: http://Make-Your-Parrot-Talk.comI was wondering… have you had a chance to
review the first lesson and give it a shot?…
By identifying yourself clearly to your subscribers you are significantly reducing the chance that they will unsubscribe, complain or click on “This is Spam” button.
Another important aspect is to include your company name and address towards the end of your message.
This is necessary to comply with the CAN SPAM legislation, but at the same time it provides an important information to your subscriber and may result in lower complaints.
3. Ensure that your emails don’t look like spam.
A lot of complaints and unsubscribes can be avoided if email marketers structure their messages appropriately.
Here are a few tips:
a) choose your Subject line carefully — it’s the first thing they will see! make sure that the Subject reflects the contents of your message and that it doesn’t remind your subscribers of spam.
b) do not write long email copy - go for “short and crisp”, then point to your website for more information;
c) don’t repeat your website URL over and over again — you are more likely to get more complaints than more sales; once or twice is
usually enough;
d) write plain text messages instead of HTML enhanced messages;
e) do not use “hash-busters” - i.e. special characters or punctuation entered in the attempt to fool the anti-spam systems (i.e. F’REE instead of FREE or v111agr^a instead of viagra);
f) run a spam-check on your messages before you send them out and fix any problems that it detects;
4. Provide an easy way to unsubscribe.
Every email that you send out must contain an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your message.
The unsubscription process must be easy to follow and effortless, and must actually work. This may sound funny, but some of the unsubscribe systems I have seen had issues and some didn’t unsubscribe at all. Test your system thoroughly to make sure that it works.
You may use an outsourced email marketing solution such as GetResponse to automate email hygine, handling unsubscribes, bounce-backs, complaints etc.
5. Be cautious of lead providers.
Purchasing leads is popular among many marketers who use them to increase the size of their lists.
Unfortunately, many of lead generation companies resort to dirty tactics to increase their profitability at the expense of customers and their subscribers.
These include:
a) sharing the same leads over and over again with multiple clients.
This not only significantly reduces the quality of the lead, but it also increases the chance that it will result in a spam complaint in the future. Quite simply, people who sign up for one publication, but start receiving email from 15 similar campaigns are very likely to complain — and for a reason.
b) “bribing” people to subscribe
Another trick is “incentivizing” leads subscriptions, by offering the subscribers some form of compensation for filling out the form, such as a coupon, a chance to win something etc. This produces leads of inferior quality, because most of the subscribers are not genuinely interested in your publication, but are signing up solely for the incentive.
c) pre-selecting signup forms
Some lead generating companies use lead generation forms with checkboxes that are pre-selected. This dilutes the list quality and results in spam complaints.
Purchasing leads carries a substantial risk for email marketers.
If you decide to purchase leads, here are a few questions that you may want to ask the supplier:
a) Are the leads generated specifically for me?
b) How are your leads generated? (ask for an example)
c) Is your lead generation process incentivized?
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Remember — when it comes to lists it is always the quality that is important, and not the quantity. It is much better to have a small and responsive lists than a large, diluted list that is much more likely to generate complaints, spam accusations and customer
support issues.
By outsourcing your email marketing to a reputable provider you will have saved yourself the hassle of dealing with all the issues associated with email hygiene.
September 29th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
This guy Ray has started a wild experiment of Making $10,000 in 3 days and he is writing every step in his blog
So u can also follow it and make atleast $1000 in 3 days - Is it not an easy way to make money on the weekends.
Forgot to say - Getresponse is in the Center of THis WILD experiment
December 12th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
There’s a great free tool to spam-check your email before you send it out over at
http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/ya_think.html
You can use it on any email you are about to send (doesn’t have to be in getresponse).
January 30th, 2007 at 3:27 am
Do you have any advice about co-registration?
March 10th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Some very useful information!
As a direct response copywriter and internet marketer, combating the decline in list response is a growing concern.
NEVER fool your list as they will never trust you.
You may be able to trick them saying “here’s a photo of your girlfriend” which takes them to your casino website (as an example) but that’s your one-way ticket to the spam folder.
Peace out
http://www.iTurboMarketing.com
June 3rd, 2007 at 5:59 am
The simple way to build your list is to be straightforward with people and actually provide content of real value
The vast majority of lists are “sales mad lists” with no content worthy of the name. I get thousands of these type of emails which needless to say are never read - some from well known “guru’s”!
It is best if you write your own email series and try to have as many messages as possible. You dont want people to “run out” of messages i.e. people who are still on your list past the last message, and you have nothing further to offer them!
If you provide real content then you will stand out from the crowd because just about every other lists out there is “going wild” with one sales letter after another
From experience I would say that all my best converting messages are the ones where I happen to mention a product or service “in passing”. If you “try” to sell something you wont succeed, but if you provide information that happens to provide a link to a product (without hype, or you must buy now, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen etc), then you will have alot more success
The other tip I would mention is - put yourself in the postion of your subscribers. What would you think of your own messages is you were a subscriber?
If you are struggling to get subscribers, then remember there is nothing magical about lead/squeeze pages in themselves. The key is the wording. So if your lead page is not working, then - change it! Experiment with different versions of your page and see what is working the best. My own method is to produce a product in PDF format, which is really just all the messages reworked into an eBook format. This way you are not giving away valuable backend links to someone else
On the subject of co-registrations, these can work quite well - certainly alot better than buying leads, especially the ones which display a box of other lists below the signup box. At least the prospect has asked for your information. Purchased leads are actually way too expensive, because 90% or more of them will not validate, therefore make it a rule never to buy email leads. The fastest way to get email leads is to participate in the free jv giveaway events - one of these recently gave me an extra 200 subscribers and it cost me nothing!