E-mail Marketing - How To Do It Right

As I mentioned in Friday’s web log, E-mail marketing is an extremely efficient means of keeping yourself in touch with your customers. You can use it to give your customers helpful hints and tips, answer frequently asked questions, as well as provide you with opportunities to get your products out there in front of your customer base, introduce new products and generally keep your brand in front of them in a helpful, non-intrusive and generally inexpensive way. But how do you get that list of customer e-mails to begin with? If you’ve sold to them, as part of the process you can ask them for their e-mail address, but it is critical that you ask the customer if it is OK for you to send them e-mail messages from time to time, otherwise you run the risk of alienating them. But how do you get e-mail addresses from people who haven’t purchased from you but may be interested in what you have to offer? There is a simple way that is easy to implement on your site and relatively inexpensive; it is called confirmed subscription opt-in, or, the “double opt-in”.

Confirmed subscription opt-in or double opt-in is a method for those seeking information from you to confirm with you that it is actually them asking to be included on your mailing list. The customer or potential customer fills out a short form on your website asking to be included in your mailing list. Once they submit the form, the form sends them an email that they have to respond to in order to complete the subscription. They are confirming, twice, that they actually want to receive the e-mails from you that you send out, be it informational, marketing or otherwise. This prevents anyone from posing as someone else and entering their email address as one that wishes to receive the information you send to your email list, be it marketing information, FAQ’s, a newsletter or sales opportunities. The potential abuser may put in a second parties email but doesn’t control that person’s email address therefore eliminating this particular scam. Not only does it confirm that they want to receive information, it is also a way of confirming that someone is likely to spend money with you and is genuinely interested in your products or services.

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