One of the biggest concerns that I receive from clients is the fear that their email marketing will cause more complaints than business. Essentially the fear they will become spammers.
No one wants to be recognized as a spammer, both because it’s not particularly great for your sending reputation, but also because it invalidates the content of the email that you worked hard to create.
Most clients who have little to no experience in email marketing have the strong belief that LESS emails is better because they aren’t bugging the receiver too often. But actually in this case less is NOT more.
I have recently adopted the strategy to do my best to communicate with my subscribers every single day, or at LEAST every other day. Why?
Because it all comes down to relationships, both with the client AND with Google.
Let’s focus on the client.
If you’re sending out emails that are short one liners telling someone to buy your product everyday and just hammering them with coupons, you’re probably going to get a few spam complaints because you’re not offering any value to the subscriber’s day.
If you were however, say, sending daily emails that provided education and entertainment, you might see a lot less spam complaints, and better responses from your list.
Edutaining email marketing is a tactic employed by some of the best of email marketers out there. They work best when they are coming from the leader of an organization, or whoever your company spokesperson is, they are framed in a conversational tone, and actually offer something of value that IS NOT paid for. (Kind of like this blog post)
For example, an edutaining email might start with
Hey Brad, Paul here!
Just wanted to check in to see how your week was going and if there’s anything you might need help with? My team is here 5 days a week to answer any questions you may have.
On top of that, I wanted to ask you, how much is too much?
Too much what? Too much email marketing.
And so on…
The email starts off with direct communication with the receiver, and let’s them know that they are valued as a subscriber and just not another person to be sold to.
Then its immediately followed up by providing value in the form of some free gift. Who can fault you if you just want to help?
One of the things I’ve learned over the many years is that helping is better than selling, so if your email marketing is focused on helping rather than selling, you’ll likely see a dramatic decrease in spam complaints, higher deliverability, and better open/conversion rates over time.
If you are constantly helping your list, the law of reciprocity kicks in, so when you give them the opportunity to part with a credit card, they do!
The other reason to adopt this strategy is for Google’s sake.
Gmail, like google, has a sophisticated algorithm that runs behind the scenes to decide whether your email ends up in the promotions, updates, spam, or inbox folder, kind of like SEO or UXO.
I wrote another article about that, wanna check it out? Just go here.
Or, if you haven’t gotten your free copy of my book Suggestology yet, you may want to read that to help with some other aspects of your business such as sales techniques and leadership. Interested? Click here.