Email Best Practices: Part 2 - Permission

Posted by Adam Peck on 25 June 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: email marketing

Welcome to the second part of our five-part series on maximizing email performance.

As discussed in the first post, there are five key elements to master, each of which is a critical contributor to email marketing success.

Today we’ll focus on Permission — which is also known as name acquisition.

GET THE NAME: Growing the email list
To maximize the number of people who subscribe to your emails, it’s an important best practice to create an opt-in process that motivates people to sign up and stay on your email list. Opt-in is the concept of granting permission to certain companies to send you relevant and desirable emails. Opt-in email is quite different from receiving “SPAM,” which is an unwanted communication without explicit permission.

Gaining email permission is a crucial element of all email marketing programs. Why bother blasting emails just to be ignored, deleted or perceived as SPAM? Even worse, emailing without permission can damage your brand’s reputation. Email Registration/Subscription Page Best Practices:

Make your Value Proposition clear and compelling

• What will the user get from providing email permission — “What’s in it for me?”
• Examples of strong value: an update to a product that a customer recently purchased. A special offer for a service they’ve indicated that they’re interested in the future. Or even an e-newsletter highlighting key industry events that affect their business.

Usability — make the opt-in form easy to find and easy to use

• Show which fields are required.
• Keep required fields to a minimum to reduce abandonment rates.
• Do not pre-check the opt-in, but make sure you provide a value statement for checking the opt-in box.

Set clear expectations

• Tell your subscribers what they will get next, and when (i.e. if they will receive a confirmation email, how soon the first newsletter will be delivered, etc.)

Confirm a successful permission

• Create a thank you page that tells users that you appreciate the permission they have granted.
• Confirm permission in a follow-up email to ensure the user provided you with a “real” email address, and not a fake address if they don’t really want to be emailed again. Otherwise, you might clog up your database with bad information.

Show a sample of what they are going to receive

• Provide a thumbnail or a link to a sample newsletter that helps to demonstrate the value of the subscription and sets proper expectations. This will also help boost opt-in rates for people who might be on the fence.

Overcome barriers to sign-up – address privacy concerns; minimize the effort required to subscribe

• Include a privacy statement to ensure users that you will not sell their emails to a third party. This also helps to increase your opt-in rate. Prospects will be more likely to grant you with their permission to email if they are confident that you will respect their privacy.
• If you do intend to provide their information to a third party, you must indicate this as well.

Check back for the next post in this series, where we will cover strategies to improve email delivery (getting past spam filters).