If you’re marketing via email, you do run a significant risk of being marked as spam by your readers. There are people out there who will mark you as spam, even if you have an unsubscribe link and even if they voluntarily signed up for an email list so they could receive your promotions. For such users, there’s really nothing you can do. They are the equivalence of the people who will call customer service to complain about something no matter how good of a product they purchased. Some people are genuinely unhappy all the time and are just looking for a reason to take it out on someone, and a spam button is an easy way to do it.
There are things that you can do, however, that can reduce the chances that you will end up being marked as spam. Some of them may not seem like good ideas from a marketing perspective, but you’ll soon find that they actually are if you do them right.
That Button
Entrepreneur.com advises that you not only make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your email newsletters, but that you make the button very visible. This can diffuse bad situations. Here’s why.
If you look at a lot of marketing emails, you notice that you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the unsubscribe link. Quite frequently, the unsubscribe link is made as inconvenient as possible to find and use. If you do click on the ultra-tiny type and go to the unsubscribe page, some marketers will want you to fill out 10 or 15 questions as to why you are unsubscribing from their list and, to make it worse, the unsubscribe link may only unsubscribe you from a specific type of marketing email rather than all of their marketing emails. There is one thing that this is guaranteed to do: make people really mad. If anything is going to get you labeled as a spammer, it is engaging in shady techniques like these and pretending that they’re not shady.
Make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your marketing emails. If they want to unsubscribe, there probably never going to click on a link in them anyway, so you’re not losing anything. Think of it like web traffic. The traffic you want going to your website is from people who are actually interested. If you get 10,000 or 15,000 people every month and 9999 of them have no interest in your product, they’re just sucking up bandwidth anyway.
The Message
You might have to push yourself a little bit harder these days to engage with customers. Remember that putting out an email newsletter is not a new or original idea. Pretty much everybody who’s involved in any kind of online marketing is doing these days. Your headlines have to be engaging. Your subject lines have to be engaging. You have to give people some reason to read it because, let’s be honest, they have a lot of email to read and reading an advertisement really might not be what they feel like doing, and lesser given a good reason.
If you are trying to develop better content, make certain that the effort is mirrored on your website. You can utilize tools such as Premium WordPress themes to give your site a look that’s consistent with your newsletter, as well, which may make people more likely to make an association between the email they got from you and your site, making it less likely that they’re going to label it as spam. Email marketing is always been challenging, and you have to put some time into it to make certain that your standards are high enough that you don’t end up in the spam box.
About Author
Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress themes, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.
