Is Your Email Glamorous or Spam-orous?
Sending an email to someone who doesn’t know you is like putting up a sign in a storefront window that says: “Don’t Do Business with Me!” Whether your email is glamorous, because it is loved by your recipients, or “spam-orous” because it is perceived as spam by your recipients, is a legal, professional, and personal matter.
It’s a legal matter because laws protect consumers from unsolicited email. It’s a professional matter because the Internet and email industries expect businesses to adhere to best practices. It’s a personal matter because ultimately your customers are the ones who determine what is spam and what is not. Quite simply, if they think your email is spam, then it’s spam.
The following sections explain the personal issues related to spam. I cover the legal and professional issues a little later on.
WHY CONSUMERS—NOT SENDERS—GET TO DECIDE WHAT SPAM IS
Your definition of spam doesn’t matter, and neither does mine, unless we define it in exactly the same way as our recipients define it. The ultimate judge and jury when it comes to spam is the recipient of the message, not the sender.
Consumers think spam is anything they don’t want or can’t verify. If they don’t want it, they think it’s spam. If they don’t know who it’s from, they think it’s spam.
As a sender, you need to recognize that your recipient’s inbox is his or her property. The average consumer considers spam an invasion of privacy—trespassing, if you will. Put yourself in your recipient’s inbox. How do you react when you receive email from someone you don’t know and don’t trust? Immediate delete. Why? Because that person is wasting your time and violating your privacy.
When you ask for someone’s email address and permission, you are asking to take some of his time and attention. When someone provides her email address, she is telling you that she respects you enough to give you something of value to her—her time and attention.
THE DANGERS OF TOO MANY SPAM COMPLAINTS
Sending email to total strangers will result in spam complaints. You should be very concerned with how many spam complaints you receive, because they have the ability to ruin your email marketing strategy. There are four reasons why you should do everything possible to avoid spam complaints.
1. Your Reputation Is Tarnished.
When people think your email is spam and your logo and business’s name appears in the email, they associate your business with those nasty spammers. If you were to send a bunch of postcards through the mail and nobody wanted them, people would just throw them away. But, if you were to send a bunch of emails through an Email Service Provider and nobody wanted them, people would hoot, holler, complain, and get enraged. Consumers really dislike spam.
2. Your Emails Get Blocked or Filtered.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN are in business to deliver the emails their customers want, while keeping the emails they don’t want from getting to their inboxes. So they spend millions of dollars and countless resources trying to deliver good email while filtering and blocking the bad email.
ISPs keep track of senders who get too many spam complaints by registering the domain name and IP address of the senders who receive the complaints. Don’t let it bother you—that is, unless you receive more than one spam complaint in every 1,000 emails. After that, you’ll start to see those complaints negatively impact your reputation with ISPs and ESPs. Once your reputation is tarnished, your email is more likely to be filtered or blocked by the ISPs.
3. You Get Tossed from Email Service Providers.
ESPs like Constant Contact send their customers’ emails from email servers owned by the ESP. In order to keep a good reputation with ISPs, ESPs need to help their customers keep their spam complaints low. Spam complaints directed at ESP customers are logged against the ESP, not the ESP’s customer.
ESP customers who receive too many complaints and are unwilling to take measures to reduce the complaints are shut down to protect the rest of the ESP’s customers and their ability to deliver email to ISPs at the highest possible rate.
4. Your Customers Won’t Come Back
When someone complains that your email is spam, you’re probably going to lose a customer for one of two reasons. First, your email probably isn’t going to get delivered to that customer’s inbox again, so your customer won’t receive the newsletters, promotions, or event invitations you work so hard to create. Second, your customer isn’t likely to be impressed with your business. If you’re perceived as a spammer, you’re like an annoying menace instead of a trusted friend.
AVOIDING SPAM COMPLAINTS ENTIRELY ISN’T POSSIBLE, BUT MINIMIZING THEM IS
Reporting email as spam can be as easy as clicking the “This is Spam” button in your email client (as shown in Figure 4.1), or as involved as finding the source of the email in the message headers and reporting that email as spam to the listed owner of the IP address. The public can also report unsolicited email to third-party reporting services, such as SpamCop and SpamHaus.
Figure 4.1 The spam button allows consumers to easily report spam emails.
Since spam complaints are often a matter of opinion, they are sometimes triggered by factors that are out of your control. Even if you’re a permission-based email marketer, if you wait long enough, you’ll get a few spam complaints. Sometimes you’ll even get them—albeit inadvertently—from your friends, relatives, and life-long customers.
Within Constant Contact we provide our customers with feedback in the event that one of their recipients reports an email as spam. Receiving a spam complaint from someone who is supposed to know you and your business might feel like you’re being betrayed by a friend, especially when you’ve worked so hard to build a permission-based list. You are following the rules, so why the spam complaint?
It may be that certain characteristics of your email look like spam to your subscribers or they aren’t satisfied with what they are getting from you. But take heart: There are ways to help more of your recipients respond with approval instead of with the spam button.
HOW TO LOOK PROFESSIONAL IN A HOSTILE INBOX ENVIRONMENT
The best way to look professional to your audience is to become an email critic and study what comes into your own inbox. I suggest creating several email folders, one for email that stands out from all others and positively impacts your opinion of the sender, and another for messages that make you never want to do business with a company.
Over time, you may find reasons to create sub-folders for great subject lines, beautiful templates, and great calls to action. However, for starters, two should suffice. Leverage the best of the best as you create your campaigns, and before you schedule the campaign to be sent, check it against the characteristics of the bad campaigns to make sure you stand out from the crowd.
Still, there are some common elements that can cause consumers to pull the spam-complaint trigger that might go unnoticed when you’re reviewing the emails in your inbox. Here are the five most common consumer spam-complaint triggers and how you can avoid pulling them.
1. Questionable Identity
Clearly communicating your identity is the number one way to avoid spam complaints. According to a survey by the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, 79 percent of consumers clicked the spam button when they didn’t know who the sender was. Here are the two simplest ways to make your identity apparent.
• Use a familiar name in your “From” line. Use the same words your audience uses to identify you or your business. For example, if you’re an online business and your customers refer to you by your domain name instead of your formal business name, put your domain name in your From line. If you are your brand, and everyone on your list knows who you are, use your name. An example of a well formatted From line would be [email protected], while one at the other end of the spectrum might look like this: [email protected].
• Include your brand. Insert your logo into the upper left or center of every email and include image descriptions (alt. text) for readers who have images disabled. Choose colors that identify your business when designing your email templates and use the same colors in every template you use. Don’t just use the stock template colors.
2. Irrelevant Content
Consumers expect their email subscriptions to deliver value. According to eMarketer, 46 percent of Internet users say the commercial emails they receive are not targeted to their needs. Since your email list is likely to include people with a variety of interests, take these interests into account before you send.
• Offer choices on your sign-up form. Some consumers want to receive promotions, while others only want informative newsletters. Offering options helps you make your emails relevant.
• Use click-through data to target future messages. When people click on your links, they tell you what they are interested in. Use this data to create different email lists.
• Send surveys and polls to learn about preferences. Instead of making assumptions about what to send, ask. You can conduct a formal survey before starting a major email campaign or use ongoing polls to get small bits of information over time and adjust your strategy as you go. 
Figure 4.2 Welcome emails help you to reinforce and match the interests of new subscribers.
3. Broken Promises
Sending emails that your subscribers didn’t ask for (i.e., promotions when they signed up for an email newsletter) can be perceived by your audience as a broken promise. Give your subscribers clear expectations before they share their email addresses, then keep your promises.
• Tell your new subscribers what you’re going to send. Clearly describe each type of email communication you offer (e.g., promotions, newsletters, event announcements) and ask new subscribers which they would like to receive.
Send a welcome email after new subscribers join. Whether they join through your web site or you add them to your list after they subscribe offline, send a welcome email that clearly describes the email content you plan to send. You can also send welcome emails after your audience has received a few of your emails to make sure they are happy and receiving the right information (see Figure 4.2).
4. Excessive Promotion
Selling your products or services is an important part of your email marketing, but, according to a Jupiter Research survey, 40 percent of consumers said they stopped subscribing to opt-in emails because they were getting too many offers. Sending promotions too frequently might lead to spam complaints.
• Keep your promotional frequency in line with your business model. If you sell items that are consumed quickly, your audience probably expects more frequent promotions than if you sell items that are normally purchased every few months, years, or once in a lifetime.
• Place promotions on your web site and use informative email content to drive clicks. Instead of putting an entire article and a promotion in your email newsletter, use only the first two or three sentences in your email and post the rest of the article, and a related promotion, on your web site.
• Know your audience’s promotional preferences. Some consumers love coupons, sales, and discounts. Others don’t. If you’re not sure of your audience’s promotional preferences, use a survey, a poll, or a choice of interest list to sort your subscribers into groups.
5. Confusion and Illusion
Sometimes consumers report legitimate email as spam because they simply want to get off a list and don’t understand the negative impact of hitting that spam button. Here are two reasons why consumers might choose the spam button over the more forgiving option of unsubscribing.
• Your subscribers can’t figure out how to unsubscribe. If your audience has trouble finding the unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email, use a permission reminder at the top of your email that includes the link.
• Your subscribers don’t trust the unsubscribe link in your email. Use your sign-up process and welcome email to reinforce the ability to safely unsubscribe from your list by clicking the unsubscribe link in any of your emails.
While it may be impossible to take the sting out of receiving a spam complaint, it is possible to minimize the amount of complaints you receive. Stick to permission-based tactics, make your identity clear, send relevant content, and keep tabs on your frequency. If you put all these tips into practice, then you’ve done everything in your power to keep subscribers on your list and stop them from clicking the spam button when they receive your emails.
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