Don’t let your email marketing campaign get mistaken for spam

Having an aggressive email marketing campaign is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business over the Internet. However, it is easy to accidentally become too aggressive and be flagged for spam. There are a few principles you should keep in mind when you are setting your campaign up so that you can maintain an ethical marketing strategy.

Where is the magic line between a spam email and a legitimate email? Unfortunately, there isn’t one. Marketing email or spam? describes how you can only try to minimize the likelihood that an email will be reflected as spam. Sometimes even the most innocent messages can get flagged by a very conservative recipient. Unfortunately, you can never control how someone is going to respond to your message.

The most obvious thing to keep in mind is that you should never send an email to someone who doesn’t want it. As obvious as this may sound, it is also one of the most important things to remember. One of the best ways to ensure that you don’t get flagged for spam is to use your personal contact information. This helps you build trust with your recipients and keeps you from being flagged by the filters. If you would like to know more, read Autoresponders and Efficient Email Marketing.

You must also take into consideration the nature of the people you are trying to reach. If you have composed a list of people who are interested in learning more about a particular topic, you may find that they are going to be fairly open to receiving messages from someone who can educate them. On the other hand, if you are selling a product that has been traditionally been sold by black hat marketers (even though you are not one yourself) you are going to have a hard time getting through to your recipient.

Email marketing is not an exact science. You never know how an individual customer is going to respond to your message, but you can maximize the chance of getting your messages through to your recipients successfully by trying to establish trust with them.