Email-Marketing.me

Unsubscribe – a term used in email marketing to describe the action when the email recipient requests to be excluded from any future communications through mass mailing.

Some marketers see the unsubscribe feature only as a legal requirement that is enforced upon them. However if managed correctly, the unsubscribe can become a very valuable list management tool.

The email marketing is not all about the quantity of the emails sent, it is all about the quality. It does not matter how many emails you send if your email is irrelevant to the recipient. For this reasons you have to keep your lists as clean as possible and make sure that only those people receive your emails that are interested in what you have to say.

It is a good practice to add the “report abuse” link at the top of the email. This will reduce the chance of being reported as being a spammer. The emails should go to abuse@yourdomain.com and forwarded to your email address. I strongly suggest you respond to those emails asap and even give them a call  to explain why they received your email if necessary. The people on the other line will be pleasantly surprised by talking to real human being instead of receiving an autoreply “Thank you for your message. We will deal with your enquiry as soon as we can be bothered.” In the end it is all about the relationship with the customer.

more to come..

More information on legal aspects of email marketing to be added

Blacklists are a very effective way of fighting spam. It affects the UCE vendors and deliverers directly. The domains that send masses of emails to addresses that do not exist or being rejected, because of the message contents (Hard/Soft Bounce) are being added to the blacklists. The email recipients Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and Email Service Providers (ESP’s) match the sender domain and the landing page domains against the known blacklists to determine whether it is listed. If so, the email is being marked as spam.

To stop spammers crawl the web searching for email addresses, ISP’s, ESP’s and blacklist owners such as SPAMHAUS Project publish email addresses on random blogs (spam trap address). Those email addresses serve no other purpose than wait for emails to start coming in. Every message sent to those email addresses indicate that the email address was automatically scraped off the website in order to be marketed and the sender domain has to be blacklisted.

Blacklists are a powerful tool of cleaning the web of the unwanted mail. However this is a big problem for legitimate email marketing companies as this can affect their entire internal email delivery. Most blacklists take a long time to be cleared and often blacklist owners charge a fee for the domain to be de-listed.