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\nEmail marketing is a tricky business<\/strong> \u2013 send too few emails, and you risk missing out on sales opportunities; send too many, and you could be alienating customers or driving up unsubscribe rates.<\/p>\n \u201cBrand spam\u201d \u2013 in other words, an overload of communication messages from businesses \u2013 is today’s\u00a0leading reason for unopened and flagged emails by consumers. John Fleming, a Marketing Director at research firm\u00a0Webtrends<\/a>, says: \u201cAs consumers, we\u2019re happy to sign up to receive updates from brands, but only bother to open the ones we find relevant. This means companies are wasting loads of money sending us things we just don\u2019t care about \u2013 and in many cases it\u2019s turning us off.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, committing brand spam hurts a company\u2019s reputation, and wastes a lot of marketing dollars on emails that go unopened and deleted. Companies should aim\u00a0to optimize their marketing spend to be more effective, and make sure their marketing messages are going out to customers who will actually open and click these emails.\u00a0In this blog post, we\u2019ve included a few suggestions on how businesses can make sure they\u2019re not\u00a0sending out “brand spam” to their customers:<\/p>\n 1. Don\u2019t buy customer lists<\/strong><\/p>\n Purchasing email addresses from vendors and third parties is not only unethical, but also illegal in many jurisdictions. What’s more, customers are\u00a0unlikely to open emails from sources they don’t recognize, and will probably flag your email as spam. So make sure that all of the subscribers in your mailing list have knowingly agreed to receive your messages – it might be a slower process of growing a subscriber base, but it will teach you a lot about customer acquisition, and help to foster a truly engaged and interested mailing list.\u00a0Plus, it\u2019s just the right thing to do.<\/p>\n Takeaway:<\/strong> Make sure everyone on your mailing list actually signed up to receive your communications.<\/p>\n 2. Set different delivery times for your emails<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve ever been woken up in the middle of the night by a marketing email, then you probably understand the frustration that many customers feel about receiving messages at the wrong time. Companies should send out marketing emails that are tailored for time zones, national holidays, and even\u00a0a user’s past email behavior. For example, some of your customers probably tend to open\u00a0their emails late at night, while others check early in the morning. Breaking down your mailing list into smaller groups \u2013\u00a0and sending messages\u00a0at times that will actually catch their attention \u2013\u00a0will improve email open and click rates.<\/p>\n Takeaway:<\/strong> Segment delivery times based on time zones, holidays, and even past customer behavior.<\/p>\n 3. Offer something of value\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Subscribers\u00a0are giving up their time and contact information when they sign up for your mailing list – and they’re looking for something of value from your messages. As a 2012 study by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey<\/a> shows, 58% of consumers say that their top reason for subscribing to brand email communications is to receive discounts or special offers – so make sure that your emails deliver in this regard!<\/p>\n But emails don\u2019t necessarily have to offer a monetary discount to be valuable either \u2013 if you share interesting and relevant content with your customers, that will still be\u00a0worthwhile to the readers as well. As a recent\u00a0Earnest Agency<\/a>\u00a0demonstrates,\u00a072% of B2B buyers reported that they would be happy\u00a0to share content via email as long as it was considered useful to them.<\/p>\n Takeaway:<\/strong> Share content and offers that your subscribers will want to read, not the things that you<\/em> want them to care about.<\/p>\n 4. Personalize your email content\u00a0– subject lines, text, and offers<\/strong><\/p>\n Above all, personalizing your email content is the most important way to combat perceptions of\u00a0brand spam. As John Fleming\u00a0notes in the Webtrends report,\u00a0\u201cOf the 20 per cent of Brits who never open brand emails, 60 per cent say they would be more likely to open them if the subject line contained information that was personalised to them.\u201d<\/p>\n But personalization is about more than just customizing subject lines (although that is very important!) \u2013 it\u2019s about customizing\u00a0the content\u00a0that users\u00a0will see in their emails, accounting for regional tastes and customs, and suggesting products based on what customers purchased in the past. Analyzing past purchase\u00a0behavior and customer data\u00a0will help to inform what your customers\u00a0are interested in buying, so that the\u00a0emails you write are offering the right content, subject lines, and products to help you make a sale. That’s the best way to ensuring your emails aren’t seen by customers as “brand spam” sitting in their inboxes.<\/p>\n Takeaway:<\/strong> Make sure customers are receiving emails tailored for their interests, tastes, and past purchasing trends.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This year, about 84% of all email traffic will be flagged as spam by users and email providers. It’s important that businesses make sure their email marketing is getting to the right users, contributing to brand positivity, and actually driving new sales and conversions to boost your marketing ROI. If you’d like to hear more about how\u00a0your email marketing can be\u00a0personalized\u00a0for customer needs and purchases, get in touch with us here at Canopy Labs<\/a>!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Email marketing is a tricky business \u2013 send too few emails, and you risk missing out on sales opportunities; send too many, and you could be alienating customers or driving up unsubscribe rates. \u201cBrand spam\u201d \u2013 in other words, an overload of communication messages from businesses \u2013 is today’s\u00a0leading reason for unopened and flagged emails […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2291"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5816,"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions\/5816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.oddbee.com\/canopy-labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}