Tips for e-mail marketing in a spam-filled world

If e-mail marketing weren't so cheap, convenient, and so often downright effective, we wouldn’t have to worry about spam.

Despite the tide of unsolicited messages, consumers remain eager to receive e-mail when the offers meet their needs.

If you send the right message to the right customer at the right time, you can score solid returns. If you're eager to get started, sign up for our E-mail Marketing feature in Office Live Small Business, and then read this article on e-mail marketing basics.

When you're ready to ramp up, here are 12 smart ways to get your message out to prospects who want to hear from you.

1. Create your own marketing list.   The best prospects for new products or special offers are current satisfied customers and people who already know you. With an in-house database, you can identify repeat or premium customers and target them with customized offers. (Contact Manager, included in Office Live Small Business, provides just such a database.)
2. Test, test, test.   Before investing in an e-mail campaign may end up alienating prospects, test your message. An easy test is to send to an "nth" sample of your list. For example, if your list is 5,000 names, send to every 500th name; if 100, send to every 10th name. Not only will this get you feedback on content and offers, but you’ll also learn how well your messages fare on different operating systems, different e-mail clients, and different spam filters.

   Tip: If you are sending out an HTML newsletter with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you can test the code in the e-mail before sending it out with the Outlook HTML and CSS Validator.

3. Segment your e-mail.   If you have more than one e-mail address for your business, using different addresses can help you identify which lists work better (and can also protect customer privacy). For example, you can use one alias for e-mail messages that go to your customer database and another for messages to third-party rented lists. You can check whether your messages are effective by monitoring whether they are driving visits to your Web site. (Use the Reports feature in Office Live Small Business.)
4. Ask customers to confirm their subscriptions, or "white-list."   Basically, "whitelisting" is an update of the "double opt-in" guideline for permission-based e-mail marketing. When prospects subscribe, marketers typically respond with an automated message that asks them to confirm the subscription, called "double opt-in."

   Nowadays, because of increased protections from spam filters, trusted marketers are asking customers to confirm subscriptions by also adding the e-mail address to their Outlook address books. That way, marketing messages breeze right into the inbox. Try this in confirmation requests by using the subject line to say: "Please confirm your subscription now." Then explain how that’s done in the message. Of course, such privileges last only so long as customers trust you. Be careful to honor that.

5. Use the phone too.   For many businesses, especially big-ticket sellers and service providers, it makes sense to first generate new customers by phone (during normal business hours). After that, you can send out e-mail invites to subscribe to anyone interested. Subscribers are then primed to expect your e-mail.
6. Add an incentive.   Prospects are more likely to subscribe if you offer something in return for their interest and e-mail address. This can range from free samples or discounts, insider information or product news, two-for-one service deals, or access to market research and intelligence.
7. Target your e-mail.   Don't stretch your subscribers' limited time and attention. Instead, look into tools that enable you to segment and personalize your messages. With sophisticated and affordable applications, you can gear your messages to specific interests of selected customers or groups. By using Microsoft Office Live Business Contact Manager, for example, you can quickly group customers into distinct audiences, such as customers with similar demographics, purchasing histories, or other characteristics. Targeted offers tend to boost response rates.
8. Avoid spam triggers.   Certain terms and keywords attract the filters, for obvious reasons. To avoid having your message land in the junk mail folder, steer clear as much as possible of words such as "refund," "click here," or even "free." Don’t use lots of capital letters in the subject line or the body of the message. Watch out for over-the-top punctuation (!!!). And forget marketing phrases like "While supplies last" or "Call for a free quote."

   Also, you should consider adopting the Sender ID program from Microsoft in order to avoid landing in junk-mail folders. The program validates the origin of e-mail messages by verifying the IP address of the sender against the domain of the sender.

9. Be smart and strategic.   Customers often subscribe only to find themselves besieged by daily e-mails or abused by third-party ads. That’s a sure route to oblivion for you. Once a prospect has subscribed, keep your messages relevant and reasonable.
10. Keep lists up-to-date.   Be prompt about weeding out bounce-backs—that is, the messages returned because of outdated addresses, nonexistent accounts, or mailboxes too full to receive. First, it’s a waste of your money to send to such addresses. Then, too, Internet service providers often penalize marketers who regularly receive a significant number of bounces.
11. Make it simple to unsubscribe.   The U.S. CAN-SPAM act, passed in 2003, legally allows you to wait 10 days after a request before deleting a subscriber name from your database. But you should move more quickly. When a customer wants to call it quits and you make it hard or longwinded, you’ll end up with bad word-of-mouth for years to come. It’s not worth the hassle.
12. Last but not least, make sure it looks good.   Too many marketers lavish time and money on research and logistics, while overlooking the fact that the message must be well-designed and attractive to rate a response. To get started, take a look at the free newsletter templates on Microsoft Office Online.

About the author   Joanna L. Krotz is the founder of Muse2Muse Productions, a custom content company for business and consumer magazines, newsletters and digital imprints. Krotz has launched marketing Web sites and e-news portals, as well as created magazines and online marketing for a variety of companies. She is co-author of The Microsoft Small Business Kit, a 500-page guide to launching and running a small business.