Category: Email Marketing

Much like privacy Laws regarding postal and privacy, sending email also has binding privacy legislation that must be followed. These Laws are referred to as the CAN SPAM Act. If you’re going to be sending email to subscribers, you need to know about CAN-SPAM Law and how to be complaint.

CAN-SPAM Law: A Brief History

CAN-SPAM Law is a shortened version of the name of Public Law No. 108-187, which was signed into Law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003. The full name of the Law and bill was Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. Of course, the name was also a play on the fact that unsolicited and unwanted email is typically referred to as “spam.” The Law gives the U.S. Federal Trade Commission the right to enforce the standards of the law (which we’ll discuss in detail below). You may think, based on the amount of unwanted and unsolicited email that you receive daily, that the Law is not particularly effective. However, as a sender of email, you are still governed by it. If the proper complaints are filed against you and you are found to be in violation of CAN-SPAM Law, then you are subject to large fines. Fortunately, being in compliance of CAN-SPAM Law is quite simply if you follow a few basic rules.

What Type of Email Sending Does CAN-SPAM Law Cover?

It’s also misleading to think that CAN-SPAM Law only applies to large bulk email sends. CAN-SPAM Law covers all commercial email messages. What does that mean? According to the wording of the Law, it means “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.” That includes email that promotes content on a commercial website, so if your website makes any money at all and your email links back to it, you are liable under CAN-SPAM Law.

What Are the CAN-SPAM Law Fines?

Each separate email in violation of CAN-SPAM Law is liable for a fine of up to $16,000.

How Do I Make Sure that I’m CAN-SPAM Law Compliant?

There is good news. It’s very easy to be CAN-SPAM Law complaintCAN-SPAM Law complaint. Here are the steps that you need to follow.

Don’t Use False or Misleading Email Header Information: This one is easy. Your “From”, “To” and “Reply-To” fields on your email as well as the routing information (which includes the domain name and email address) but accurately identify the business or person who initiated the message. That mean’s if you own JoeSchmoe.com and want to send an email to your users, the email has to come from JoeSchmoe.com and not from another url or domain.

Don’t Use Deceptive Subject Lines: Your subject line must accurately reflect what’s in the content of your email. If your email contains an offer for 10% off of a Persian rug, your subject line can’t say that the Persian rug is free or talk about a completely unrelated topic just to incite people to open the email.

Identify That the Email is An Ad: You can do this in very subtle ways as the law is not detailed on it. However, somewhere your email must reveal that the message is an advertisement. A “brought to you by” at the close of the email is often considered sufficient.

Provide a Physical Location: You must let recipients know where you are physically located via a physical postal address within your email. This is not optional. It can be a street address or a postal box address. However, you must provide a way for users to reach you via registered postal mail.

Let Recipients Know How to Opt Out of Future Emails: This is completely non-optional.Your email must always provide recipients with a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt-out of getting any email from you in the future. It must be easy for a person to recognize, read, and understand.. The best methods, which are usually automatically handled by email marketing platforms such as Comm100, will provide either a return email address or an easy-to-click-to web page where users can quickly unsubscribe from future mailings. You are allowed to create a menu in which users can opt-out of only specific types of mailings, but you are always required to give the user the option of opting out of ALL future mailings from you (called a “Universal Unsubscribe”).

Honor Opt-Out Requests Promptly and Honorably: Whichever opt-out mechanism you choose to use must be able to process opt-out requests for at least thirty-days after you send your email message, and users’ requests to opt-out must be honored within ten business days. You are not allowed to charge a fee or require a recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address. You may not make a recipient take any step other than to send a reply email or visit a single page on a website as a condition for opting-out of an email list. After people have opted out of an email list, you cannot sell, rent or transfer their email addresses, even if those are contextualized as part of a postal mailing list.The ONLY exception to this rule is that you may transfer the email addresses to a company that you have hired in order to help you be CAN-SPAM LAW complaint.

Monitor What Others Do On Your Behalf: Even if you have hired another company to do your email marketing, you are still the responsible party under the law as both the company whose product is being promoted as well as the company who sent the email are legally responsible. This is a particularly important point if you run an affiliate marketing program as one of your marketing channels.

Being CAN-SPAM Law complaint isn’t actually too difficult, and it’s made easier with an email marketing platform that monitors your CAN-SPAM Law compliance elements where possible such as Comm100. However, just because it’s simple, it doesn’t mean that it’s not important. Being CAN-SPAM Law complaint is one of the most important things that you can do as part of your email marketing program. After all, $16,000 per separate email based off of one error or customer complaint can add up quickly. Don’t be a spammer! Send your marketing email in compliance with the Law.

It’s always important to understand the history of something in order to understand why it’s important! Learn about the story of Email Marketing History to see how email marketing evolved as well as the challenges of offline direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business marketing communications that email marketing has provided a solution to.

Before the Story of Email Marketing History: Remember the Days of Postal Mail Marketing?

Take a minute and take a walk to your mailbox. No, we don’t mean walk to your computer to check your inbox. We mean a walk to your actual, physical mailbox where people mail you paper letters and packages. Now take a moment to sort through the mail that you find there. Chances are that you will find several promotional or marketing flyers which are trying to sell you localized services. However, you may also find catalogs and promotional postcards for global or larger brands.

Now, take a moment to consider what the world would be like if postal mail to your physical mailbox were the only way to send you customized communications to market products and services. It would be a highly inefficient system. Because postal mailings need to be printed in bulk to reduce costs, your message could only be mildly customized to include your name. Then, whoever wanted to advertise to you would have to pay for not only the printing of the postcard, flyer or catalog to be mailed, but also for all of the stamps or postal costs to send the mailing. Finally, the marketer who sent the mailing would have to wait for a period of time for you to receive it. It may be several weeks until the post office delivered it, and it may be even longer until you removed the mailing from your mailbox and read it. Because of that timing, the offer that the marketer was sending to you couldn’t be specific and time relevant. Finally, the marketer had no way of knowing if the postal mailing had had any impact on you unless you then used a specific promotional code included on the mailing. There was no way to know if you’d even looked at or received your mailing!

Does this sound like an ineffective way to market your products or services to a mass consumer audience? Well, until as recently as the 1990s, it was largely the only way to get a marketing communication into the hands of a specific individual. Marketers came up with many ways to attempt to make postal marketing mailings more personalized and to better track their response rates, but the truth was that once you sent a postal mailing, figuring out if it worked or didn’t work was more guess-work than actual facts. The entire process was, and is, expensive, time consuming and difficult to judge the success of.

Fortunately for you and your consumer or business-to-business marketing needs, the 1990’s happened and the internet was born. Soon after, email began to become a primary form of both personal and business communications. Not long after the popularity of personal email exploded, email marketing became a specialty area for those with marketing expertise because of its improved capacity for customization, segmentation, frequency, relevancy of communications and, most importantly, tracking capabilities.

1991: The “Birth” of the Internet

While there are many people who “claim” to be the founder of the internet, experts say that the internet as we know it began in 1991 when CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) publicized a paper known as the New World Wide Web Project. Though a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, had actually been creating html, http and the world’s very first web pages at CERN as early as two years prior to the paper, the publishing of the paper is considered the “birth” of the internet. Not only did the internet change life as we know it, it also changed marketing as we know it!

Over the next decade, many experts estimate that the internet grew as much as one hundred percent per year in terms of bandwidth used. The greatest spikes of growth were seen in 1996 and 1997. Today, of course, you would have a hard time finding anybody who does not admit that the internet plays a key role in their daily lives, from information gathering to processing communications, primarily through the use of email and, more recently, social media.

1996: Hotmail Becomes the First Web-Based Email Service

One of the greatest benefits of the rise of the internet was the ability to use email, or electronic mail, to communicate with people. Email was fast, free and could speed up communications across the world in a way that most people had not previously imagined. However, during the first years of the internet, email was only available to people who fit into specific groups: college students using their college email address or employees who were able to use corporate email addresses. The second group typically had significant limitations on how they could use their email and whom they could communicate with. While some individuals could also get email services provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP), those services typically required that you checked your email specifically from the computer that was supported by your ISP. Email was not a “pick up and go anywhere” type of communication.

Then, in 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched what was then called Hotmail(with the letters being a reference to html). It was the first web-based email system, and suddenly email was available to anybody who had access to the internet. That didn’t just mean people who had home computers that were internet wired. It also meant anybody who could use a public computer at a library or business center. Suddenly, email was no longer limited to just a small group of people who needed to communicate primarily with each other. Email was out of the bag to the public, and anybody who wanted to communicate with anybody else could do so via Hotmail. Not surprisingly, people loved the service and flocked to it. A year later in 1997, Microsoft purchased Hotmail for four hundred million dollars and renamed it MSN Hotmail.

Just How Many People Use Email Today?

Today, Hotmail is still technically the largest web-based email service in terms of raw users, according to the most recent comScore data (August of 2010). Hotmail is reported to have three hundred and sixty-four million users. Yahoo! mail is the second largest with a reported two hundred and eighty million users, and Google’s Gmail is third with one hundred and ninety-one million users.

Beginning of Email Marketing History: The Birth of Email Marketing

While email began as a communications tool for academic and business purposes, it soon became a tool for personal communications among friends, relatives and even people who had never met in real life! As people began to spend more and more time using email as their primary communications tool, smart marketers realized that email communications were the future of marketing communications and began to make the shift into using email as a way to effectively communicate with customers. Email Marketing, even in its earliest days, presented a number of benefits over both postal marketing and telesales as a form of direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business communications. We’ll look at those benefits in detail in the next section of this book, but today email marketing is a robust portion of any complete marketing plan and has entire industries built around helping businesses of all sizes effectively email market.

Comm100 Email Marketing would, of course, be an example of this. Comm100 Email Marketing works to develop email marketing software that streamline the sending of email to consumers or business contacts with customized messages and complete tracking. In addition to companies that focus primarily on developing email marketing solutions, individuals have become email marketing experts as well. Most mid-sized or larger companies employ at least one email marketing specialist and may have as many as several employees who focus on nothing but creating effective email marketing strategies and campaigns.

Of course, you may not need an entire staff, but you do need to understand the basics of email marketing strategy, benefits and tactics of email marketing. We’ll cover all of those in this book to make you your own email marketing expert by the end!

Why does email marketing present such a benefit over other more traditional forms of marketing? Why does it drive better returns on investment and customer engagement metrics than other marketing techniques? Why would you invest the time and resources to develop an email marketing program at all? In this article, Comm100 presents you the top ten email marketing benefits to your business compared to other forms of marketing, including:

Email Marketing Benefits No.1: Reduced Time & Effort

Take a moment to think about the time and effort involved in structuring a direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business campaign using one of the two most common offline direct marketing communications techniques:

• Print Postal Mailings: You’ll need to allow time for a designer to create the mailing, typically through several lengthy revisions. Then you’ll need to allow time for the print mailing to be printed, cut and, if necessary, stuffed into envelopes. There will be time while the marketing collateral is being transported via the postal system and then time while you wait for the consumer to retrieve it from the mail box.
• Telesales Campaigns: In addition to having to construct a telesales script, you’ll have to wait the time out while your sales agents dial through cycled call attempts to all of the sales leads or customers on your target list.

With email marketing, however, you can turn a marketing communications piece out in typically less than two hours. Using recurring email templates, all you’ll need to do is to approve the copy for the email and any changes to graphics, use easy database list queries like those available in the Comm100 system to decide whom to send to, and then just hit send. Weeks’ of work can be accomplished in just a few hours and by a single employee.

Email Marketing Benefits No.2: Real-Time Messages

As we talked about above, with a print mailer or telesales campaign, you’ll need to select marketing campaigns and specials that have a “long tail” because of the extended period of time between campaign development and implementation. Because a marketing email can be completed in just a few hours, you can literally send “day-of” messages to help reduce stock or promote a limited time special as needed. You can even send unique real-time messages to customers that arrive on their birthdays or anniversaries. With email marketing, short time frames are your friend, not your enemy.

Email Marketing Benefits No.3: Personalize Messages

Because print mail campaigns, telesales campaigns and even print, television and radio advertising campaigns must be done in a mostly “one-size-fits-all” format, it’s difficult for you to speak directly to your consumer in a personalized way. However, email marketing presents many dynamic opportunities. Not only can you send personalized email with your user’s name or login name, but many email marketing solutions offer the ability to feed in personalized information such as sales or purchase history. Also, because creating separate email sends is significantly less challenging than creating separate postal mail, print mail or advertising campaigns, you can segment your customer list into smaller lists and send very personalized messages. For example, you can select all of your users or customers who are from New York City and then write your email marketing copy to speak directly about New York City. With email marketing and communications, you can easily speak to your customers in a very personalized and intimate way that is not possible with other marketing channels and avenues.

Email Marketing Benefits No.4: Segment User and Customer Database Information

As noted above, because you can segment your database of customers or users with email, you can send extremely targeted marketing campaigns that will result in increased sales conversions simply because they are so specific. For example, if you sell flowers, you can find everybody in your database who ever bought daffodils and then send them an email in April when the first daffodil shipments come in. You’re then using your customer database to put the most relevant message in front of the customers who are most likely to respond to it, and that’s what good marketing is all about.

Email Marketing Benefits No.5: More Frequent Communications

Because email takes less time to create and send than other marketing and advertising channels do, you can communicate with your customers more frequently. Instead of only being able to send them a flyer or catalog once a month or once a quarter, you can easily send them offers once a week. You could, of course, send them email even more frequently than that if their email activity supports making that decision. You may want to note, however, that it’s one of the typical email marketing best practices to not send customer emails more than once a week. However, gone are the days when you were lucky to get a message in front of your customers once a month. Via email marketing, you can communicate with customers weekly or even daily!

Email Marketing Benefits No.6: Test Marketing Messages

Good marketing always means being able to test things! With email marketing, it becomes incredibly easy to see what graphics, headlines, offers and even colors your users and customers will respond to. It’s incredibly simple to simply send one version of an email to one part of your list and a second version of an email to a different part of your email list. Then, through the very precise tracking tools that email marketing offers, you can figure out which marketing message worked better to convert sales or user actions. We’ll talk in detail about both the great tracking tools that email marketing offers as well as common types of email testing later on in this book.

Email Marketing Benefits No.7: Information Spreading

When was the last time that you saw a customer hand over a postal mailing that they’d received to a friend who might be interested? Or have you have seen somebody clip an ad from a magazine and send it to a family member who may want that product or service? However, forwarding an email with an enticing or useful offer or piece of information only takes seconds and many users will do it. That means that your marketing effort has not only a wider reach but also a networked reach with people who, by forwarding the email, are now acting as your brand advocates.

Email Marketing Benefits No.8: Reduce Overhead Costs

Email marketing can be done at a very low overhead cost! You don’t need a ton of employees, designers, or marketing analysts. You don’t need to pay for printing, postal mailing costs, phone lines, or advertising rates. In fact, there are services, such as Comm100 Email Marketing, that allow you to host your email marketing using professionally-designed templates that you can then just alter to your own needs. An effective email marketing program only needs a great email marketing platform or service and a good marketer who knows how to put the right offers and the right copy and graphics in front of the right portion of your user or customer list. There is no marketing channel in which you’ll spend less to get greater returns on your investment than email marketing.

Email Marketing Benefits No.9: Exponentially Better Ability to Track Sales and User Engagement

There may be no better marketing channel from which to draw precise and usable tracking information to help you figure out what’s successful and what’s not than email marketing. Well-developed email marketing platforms such as Comm100 Email Marketing can provide tracking information on how many people opened an email, how many people clicked a link in an email, which specific link within the email was clicked, how many people complained that an email was spam or unsubscribed and, of course, whether your email even made it into your recipient’s inbox.Combine that with a business’s ability to track sales back to a source and you can identity customer engagement and response through an entire cycle with clear, easy-to-understand metrics.

Email Marketing Benefits No.10: Save the Planet with Email Marketing!

It may seem like a minor part of the big picture, but we’re all trying to be more environmentally friendly these days! When you optimize email marketing as your primary customer communication and direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business marketing method, you’ll help save the planet by reducing the number of trees killed for print marketing pieces. We all want to help save the planet, and making a responsible decision about your marketing tools can help you to do just that while also improving your business’s success.

Those are a lot of measurable benefits of email marketing over other marketing channels! Of course, we recommend that email marketing be an important part of your marketing mix – not the only ingredient in it. However, as you can see, if you’re not incorporating email into your marketing plan, then you’re missing out on a number of benefits that can improve your overall sales and user engagement for a very low overhead cost and, in many cases, a very limited amount of time and effort.

How can I send bulk emails to others without getting spam boxed ? I still didn’t start any email campaign or email marketing. Just want to know about this for a future program. Is there any good way to do this ?

You can discuss here using the Comments section below.