Responsible email marketing practice depends heavily on permission. The definition of permission itself is quite subtle though.

Marketers have their own idea about what permission is. On the other hand, users as the recipients also have their own opinion.

Despite this situation, the best practice in email marketing is to never spam and only send emails to those who have explicitly given their permission for you — as the marketers — to do so.

Two Reasons to Use Permission

There are at least two reasons why marketers should send email based on permission. In fact, permission marketing has become another synonym for email marketing:

1. To avoid spamming. You don’t want to send junk to random people. Not only they are not targeted to what the recipient wants, but also is an intrusion. It even can get you into trouble legally.
2. To establish proper relationship. People are hesitant to reply, let alone develop further relationship with spammer. Only after they know you, or you have something of their interest to offer, they will give you permission to send them something. The relationship develops from there.

Best Practices for Permission

In some occasions, you already have a list of customer names you want to start sending to. This is fine. There are ways you could make the process hassle free and safe.

For most marketers, getting permission involves having a user opting-in to a form on the website or sending an email to a specific address.

To ensure the user is really who owns the email address, double opt-in is the best practice to build clean in-house list. Double opt-in requires email owner to confirm their submission request before actual message is sent.

For an online store, an example of permission is when a customer buys something from you and also checks the box that said something like “please send me more information about related products and updates”.

Marketers also have the rights to send related update messages to customers, provided you also give them the choice to opt-out at any time.

What to Do in Permission Marketing

As permission-based marketing, email is effective. There are tons of study and case studies to prove that. Businesses of all sizes could take advantage of email in many way to communicate with their list of prospective customers.

It is important to stress that as an email marketer, you pay attention to permission and stay that way. Risking otherwise will not only get people to accuse you as spammer, but it could also bring disaster to your business.

Rest assured though, it is relatively easy to ensure your list is clean and practice safe email marketing if you are appropriately prepared with the right information.

Future articles will cover more about how to build your in-house list, design, sending, and tracking results from your mailings. If you are to start your own email newsletter or ezine, you are also in for a treat. Subscribe to learn more.

Email marketing involves using email to deliver permission-based communications to recipients; prospects or customers in order to build relationships, increase sales and extend customer retention.

The key is permission.

Spamming also uses email, but that is definitely not email marketing in the way we want to use it in doing our business.

Basically, there are three types of email marketing based on the purpose of the emails:

1. Promotional direct email

Solo mailing to an email list, special offer, and special promo notification are examples of emails that fall into this category.

To email this mail, you need an explicit permission from the recipients. You can obtain permission by building your in-house list: collect your prospects or customers email address by having them fill out a form on the Web site or registration page, etc.

Another way to obtain permission is by renting. In this context, the owners of the lists have explicit permission from the list members that they can occasionally send third-party promotional materials to the list.

2. Email newsletter email

The second form of email is email newsletter, which basically contains information but also sells products and services as part of the package. Unlike promotional email, newsletter doesn’t try to hard sell to the prospects or customers directly.

This type of email is good for nurturing sales leads, also for readers to keep their engagement and stay as subscribers.

A newsletter aim at developing a long term relationship with prospects and customers instead of making immediate sales. This type of email plays a big role in customer retention.

3. Advertising

Instead of sending email directly to an in-house or rented list, you pay for an advertisement in other people newsletter or directly as promotional email.

There are a lot of commercial email newsletters that allow people to buy adverising spots. The owner usually provides superb content that the subscribers really want, giving them away for free, but in return retain the rights to send promotional offers every so often.

Email marketing sounds great. It is. But far from being easy, actually building the names from scratch — not mere names but permission-based, integrating it into your business, designing and delivering the right messages to the right people and getting them to read and respond are the challenges every email marketer has to face.

After sending, marketers also should track and measure the results so that they could analyze and attempt to improve the results for the next mailing.

Those topics and more will become the topic of this blog regularly. Subscribe to get your information delivered to your desktop immediately as they are available.

Stephanie Miller points out seven ways to get more from email marketing. She writes that the best time to offer a choice of email types, content or frequency is at signup. It helps ease segmentation.

The reason behind it is that the first and last rule of registration is gaining permission. During this process it is imperative to eliminate any surprise when subscribers don’t recognize what you’ve sent as what they thought was promised.

By immediately segment them out after sign up process, we set more clear expectation.

In the article, Miller also gives out the strategy to capture data effectively by following the flow logically.

When it comes to user experience, it is important to explicitly confirm the details of the email program on the confirmation page and in the welcome message. Just because it is on the page, in the footer or a click away in the privacy policy doesn’t mean people will read it.

Email registration page is also a good place to exclusively hand out offers selected just for email subscribers. This “thank you” offer takes place as soon as a subscriber signs up.

After sign-up users should be able to change their options in an easy-to-access Email Preference Center. Encourage subscribers to visit the Center to update their preferences, take a survey, sign up for more/different newsletters and update their email addresses.

Finally, take credit if you are offering special incentives for your best buyers.

[iMedia Connection]

The Internet Advertising Bureau has made available for free a 14-page email deliverability guide. It gives a quick overview of the issue the industry has and how to increase your email deliverability.

Some of the topics it covers include:

• How email receiver filters. There are eight primary filtering methods used by ISPs and corporate system administrators as they deal with the deluge of spam hitting their servers every minute.
• How to identify if you have a deliverability problem. You can establish benchmarks, monitor your program performance and/or register for feedback.
• How to improve deliverability. This section gives five things you need to do.
• How to control filtering. Five areas within your control that contribute to filtering and how to reduce complaints.

The guide also has links to IAB resources on email authentication, accredication, and reputation services.

[IAB Email Resources]

When is the last time you send email to your friends or family members? Email may become part of your life that you don’t even notice how effective it could be as a communication tool.

But the reality is still that email is free.

Although doing email on the Internet is nothing close to free, still it is one of the most cost effective yet with the highest Return-on-Investment (ROI) available to marketers.

Email marketing has been used to:

• Acquire leads and follow-up until they become customers or unsubscribe
• Acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy more
• Build relationship with customers — as a customer retention tool — to enhance loyalty and promote word of mouth.
• As a low cost method to tap into other people’s prospects or customers to promote related products or services.
• Make special offers to interested users to encourage them become customers.
• and so on…

Email provides a direct one-to-one connection to the recipients. Studies show it is more effective than direct mail. Marketers call it the most effective direct response tool available on the history.

So, there are many thing we could do with emails in business and marketing applications. What makes it so popular?

Email marketing becomes popular because of a few reasons:

• Sending email is much cheaper than most other communication channels.
• Email is a push channel. While it also has its own drawbacks, the ability to keep your brand in front of the audience is important.
• Superior targetability. Email is a personal medium. Marketers could speak to each customer in a personal tone. It also allows you to target very specific market through your offer.
• Great results. Perhaps most important of all, email marketing has been proven to produce astounding results again and gain, despite all the rumor about its ineffectiveness due to spam, etc.
• Highly trackable. Email is a very highly measurable medium. Although not perfect, the rich of data and reports allow marketers to analyze campaigns easily.

The use of email among marketers is still going up year by year.

It is true. Email will never be like before. Marketers have to be careful in implementing every step to start, build, and grow a solid email marketing program.

Ultimately, businesses must put more though into email communications — from gathering information up front to sending messages and analyzing results.

This blog covers much of the process. If you haven’t subscribe, make sure you subscribe. It’s free.