Email Marketing

I have previously explained the important part permission can play in successful mail programs. But what if you intend to send messages to people who never gave you any level of permission to do so? You may feel entitled to send these messages because they have a veneer of legitimacy such as implied consent or legal permissibility. But is is really a good idea? Implied consent Implied consent is when you collect an email address but fail to also collect explicit permission use it for marketing purposes. Sometimes that’s fine because the address was surrendered with an assumption that that it would be used for marketing. Sometimes it’s not fine because no such assumption was made. How do you know the difference without waiting for complaints? Get any contacts with implied consent properly permissioned before you start sending marketing messages to them. Reluctance to take this step is proof of how weak you know the implied part really is. ...

Spammer math is basically any variation of the following line of reasoning: if I get one sale from a send to one thousand messages that means that I will get one hundred sales sending to one hundred thousand messages and so on until infinity. It can be expressed as (s=cm) where s is sales, c is the conversation rate, and m is the number of messages sent. This model is based on the idea that sales will scale at a constant multiplier relative to messages sent. The foil here is probability. The assumption is that each message sent has the exact same independent probability of converting. This is false because as the number of messages increases so too does the probability of bounces and complaints, which increases the probability of sender reputation problems which in turn causes the probability of conversions to increasingly diminish. In economics this is often referred to as the law of diminishing returns. ...

Sending mail to people who didn’t ask for it is often just asking for trouble. Having people give you permission to send to them is much better. In an ideal world you want first-party consent meaning that people directly subscribed to your list. You have measures in place to confirm that they really did sign up and someone didn’t just stuff their address into a subscription form. These people want your emails. ...

Many senders have concerns about sending bulk email with PDF attachments. ESPs often advise customers against doing so and suggest alternate solutions like linking to a web portal that has the PDF file. This is all very sensible. But what happens if you must send an PDF attachment due to a regulatory or some other mandatory requirement - is the campaign guaranteed to fail? The answer is no. It is possible to send a PDF attachment as part of a bulk campaign and give it a very good chance of reaching inboxes. ...