If you’re a marketer and it’s your job to send out emails to get new users/viewers, do me and the people paying you a favor - watch this video. You can really just listen to it and go about your business as not much is going on visually, but it’s pretty right on as far as what I expect out of an informative email from a marketer. It comes from New Media Sandbox and goes into usability, which I lightly touched on last week. My story made it to the front page of digg and I was slowly ripped a new one by the digg community. That’s fine, I appreciate all of the helpful and friendly feedback. (I’m completely serious.) I’m only mentioning it because usability is very important and it shouldn’t stop at your Website, it should continue on through the way you communicate with your potential users as well.
It’s worth a listen and maybe you can pass it on to the person you hired to do your marketing.
Filed under: Uncategorized |
Tags: Marketing
Nice video with some great information.
Great Video!!
I have a question though, even if you use Opt-in can you get in trouble if the people claim they never Opt-in? I mean I am not ready to risk 26 years in prison for SPAM.
What about Double Opt-In?
How can I make sure I am safe as a Email Marketer?
DigitalBrian - Maybe you could make emails password protected? (Because I really do need to remember another password
).
Digital Brian,
Regarding opt-in, set up a consistent procedure that you/your company is comfortable with that keeps a record of the transaction. For example, the bare minimum you should do would be to capture and store:
- name (self reported)
- email address (self reported)
- opt-in box that user has to click on — never pre-populate that!
- date/time stamp
- IP address
Upon successful capture, send a confirmation email to the subscriber. But that doesn’t prevent someone from entering another person’s email address to be nasty. So you can take the extra precaution of adding a link in that confirmation email for the subscriber to click and reconfirm the request was legitimate.
Note that in my experience, I always see a small percent of subscribers never take that final step, presumably because the confirmation email might have been incorrectly flagged as spam, caught in an aggressive junk mail filter or deleted because the user didn’t understand there was a final action to complete the subscription process.
Hope that helps.
Roland from NewMediaSandbox.com
Hi Molly, thanks for the kind words about my screencast/video about email marketing best practices. -Roland