I realize that many b2b tech companies are leveraging third-party demand generation tools to supplement their email marketing efforts. Applications like Eloqa, for example can help organizations streamline their email marketing efforts with rich reporting and automated lead generation capabilities. All great stuff if your serious enough to dedicate someone to these efforts. However, I really wanted to take a step back and talk more about some fundamental email marketing best practices that I see being ignored.
I recently got a ” Important Announcement From Classmates.com” email sent to me regarding some new free trial service they are offering. Even though I canceled my free account about two weeks ago, they still felt it was okay to email me. – Bad idea. My natural response was to unsubscribe from this email service seeing how I’m not interested. Well, I scrolled down to the footer (where the unsubscribe link SHOULD be) and wha-la, no unsubscribe link.
This is what the email footer looked like:
You can see there are two links; one to online help and another to the privacy policy. Where do I go if I want to unsubscribe? Seems like both options are viable ones. This feels like they are trying to make it hard for me to unsubscribe – a bit like spam. This is a good example of what not to do.
Sure, as marketers we can get discouraged about unsubscribes from our distribution lists. However, making it easy for people to do so is important to your credibility, plain and simple.
I thought it would be helpful to put together a quick list of items that commonly get ignored, but are fundamental to email marketing best practices.
- Create a Web version of your email and place link at the header
- Keep HTML emails to 500-650 pixels in width
- Use image Alt tags
- Place an unsubscribe link at the footer
- CAN-SPAM Act compliance
- Add-to-safe-senders-list request
- Provide an email address for feedback or sender contact
I realize this list leaves out a few points about email marketing targeting, management, and performance, all points I can cover in another post. For now, I thought I would stick to the most fundamental steps every email marketing initiative should have. These are pretty self-explanatory, but feel free to leave me a comment if you have a question.
By-the-way, I found the opt-out link by using the search on the classmates.com site. It’s https://secure.classmates.com/profile/login.html in case you were wondering.
Good luck,
L
