Email Best Practices

Best practices for email marketing fall into two categories. The first category is regulatory compliance with email marketing law, and the second is industry standards for regulatory compliance as well as for professionalism and practices that will increase the effectiveness of your marketing.

Regulatory Compliance

The sending of commercial email is regulated by the US Federal Government. A very important set of rules applying to email marketing is the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. This Act controls many issues relating to the sending of commercial email and the collection of email addresses. The Act stipulates that commercial email may only be sent if the sender has received “affirmative consent” from the recipient.

• The Act states that affirmative consent means, “…the recipient expressly consented to receive the message, either in response to a clear and conspicuous request for such consent or at the recipient’s own initiative…”
• The Act goes on to specify rules for the collection of email addresses and prohibits the collection of email addresses via improper means such as harvesting from a website, “ …proprietary service, other online public forum operated by another person, without the authorization of such person; and randomly generating electronic email addresses by computer.”

I cannot begin to cover all of the elements of the CAN-SPAM Act here. Here is a link for you to view a text copy of the Act: http://www.legalarchiver.org/cs.htm If you wish to engage in email marketing, you must become familiar with the regulations regarding email marketing and comply with the law! If you are uncertain of your obligations in regard to compliance with law, you should contact a qualified legal representative.

Industry Standards

Industry standards are accepted practices by reputable email marketers that can help you better comply with email marketing laws and help you achieve better success with your email marketing. Industry best practices can help you:

• Engage in methods to properly grow a list of qualified recipients for your permission email list.
• Plan your email marketing campaigns.
• Achieve higher open rates for your email.
• Create properly formatted emails that will promote your brand identity and help you avoid inadvertent SPAM filters.
• Develop proper email headers (“from” address, subject line and email address) so your email doesn’t appear misleading and also achieves higher open rates.
• Maintain your email list over the long term. This includes helping you craft email permission reminders so your email subscribers’ preferences up to date.

More Resources on Email Marketing

I have learned most of what I know about email marketing from a combination of written resources and from the Email Service Providers or “ESPs” I use. ESPs themselves are great resource for information on best practices for email marketing. I definitely do NOT recommend trying to administrate email marketing yourself! ESPs, by contrast, are generally very inexpensive services and, in my opinion, are well worth the money. They can help you manage your email lists and unsubscribe services, provide you with access to email templates to improve the look of your emails, provide you with tracking statistics that allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of any email you send, and much more.

Here are sponsored links to a few popular email service providers:

• Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers. Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• Email Marketing information from Get Response
• Email Communication Experts – Email Marketing, RSS, Surveys, and Autoresponders. Free Trial of iContact

Also, here are sponsored links for books I have found helpful for learning more about email marketing:

• E-Mail Marketing For Dummies
• Sign Me Up!: A Marketer’s Guide To Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales