There are many recommendations that you should always follow to run a quality campaign, but my personal opinion is that not only is theory valid, but there are certain assumptions about what you want to say and who you want to say it to, which will determine how much, when and how you should run your email marketing campaign to avoid falling into spam. Here, I would like to explain what we perceive as spam and why it is easy to fall into spam in your email marketing campaigns.
I don't want you to go through what happened to me… the more I research and document this, the more complicated it seems to me… you are dealing with human beings, and human beings are complex, with infinite subjective motivations, and as my mother says, “it never rains like everybody likes it.” But go ahead. I started and I am involved…
What is email marketing and what is its purpose?
There are many ways to define email marketing, but essentially it is a form of direct marketing that uses email as a commercial means of communication or to send message communication to a specific audience. Email marketing is only about communication, and if you communicate well with the right people with interesting messages and don't saturate your contacts with constant communication, then using email marketing well will be successful in building your contacts' loyalty.
Once we are clear about what email marketing is and what its purpose is, we need to clarify that it must comply with current legislation (currently the RGPD in Spain). To send commercial emails to users, their consent is required. Without permission, email marketing does not take place – or should not take place. Consent can be obtained in several ways:
For paper: This text must be printed on the coupon where the contact enters their details. This coupon must be kept in physical form or scanned so that it can be submitted as evidence to the AEPD in case of any complaint.
Leads or Online Forms: Online forms always require you to accept “Terms of Use”. Every online form has a checkbox that you must click to accept the terms and conditions. These terms and conditions state that you explicitly give permission for companies to use your data to send you commercial communications. I could spend another 6-7 pages on this, but that’s for another day…
What is considered spam?
Spam is not just unsolicited email or SMS sent in large quantities, but is sent more frequently than the recipient expects and contains content that the recipient does not expect.
For this reason, you can't have a 100% guaranteed bible on how to behave to avoid falling into spam. Even if you run a campaign that meets all the best practice recommendations for running a quality campaign, you can still make a mistake with some demographic and completely ruin your campaign, because if you send to a group with enough weight (number of users) that is not interested in what you're sending, mail servers like Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, etc. will detect it with their spam analysis tools and put it in the “dark bag” of spam…
So this is the standard by which we judge whether our communications management is good or bad, whether our BB.DD management is good or bad.Good management leads to a good online reputation and good results from your email marketing communications.
How do you create an effective email marketing campaign?
My mom told me it wasn’t normal that I was talking to myself all day, but I think her concern grew when I started answering to myself: Well, this is the crazy stuff you have to do to start building a great email marketing campaign (etc.). Ask yourself, ask yourself, and answer those questions.My advice is to argue with yourself, out loud, write the question on paper, argue with yourself, argue for one side and defend the opposite… Do this experiment and you will see how interesting it is… You may even convince yourself of the opposite opinion… Really, it happens!!!
When you do this in a group, with each person preparing and defending their own position, something really interesting emerges.
As you know, I love examples, and this one is packed with them.
Let's say you run an online shop selling “self-designed fashion shoes and accessories” and the New Year's Eve celebration is approaching (not the best example in the pandemic era, but it helps to understand better). However, during this festive season, people tend to look for nice dresses and accessories that will charm everyone on New Year's Eve. So, we decide to launch a campaign to promote our new design of women's shoes with amazing 10cm high heels.
So far, we have been successful in acquiring subscribers and collecting a lot of valuable information from them, such as their name, email address, gender, date of birth, and place of residence.
Many people will say that it is not good to ask for too much information in a survey. In my opinion, that is not right. If you need this information to properly segment your audience based on the products you offer, then that is what you need. It is certainly difficult to get users to complete a subscription process, but in this particular case it is an online shop and the user believes that to make a purchase, they need to enter a series of data necessary for the delivery of the purchased product.
Now here's the fun part (I'll try to simplify this analysis as much as possible so it doesn't get too long):
Example analysis: Who buys great high heels?
The usual answer is usually women, but isn't it men who buy them as gifts? In the case of shoes, this is less common because shoes are a very personal and complex item. Like perfume, another person (man or woman) can't choose it knowing the brand. In the case of shoes, other factors also come into play, such as the color of the dress (so that the shoe combination is appropriate), the last of the shoe itself, and even multiple conditioning factors in the mind of the person who will wear it. As mentioned before, it is too complicated to get caught up in the mess of gifting shoes with these characteristics (at least the statistics reflect this).
We already have the first segment. We will only send messages to women. There may be some men who are interested, but we believe that the percentage of interested men is much lower than the percentage of uninterested men, so we decided to sacrifice this lower percentage to avoid spamming the uninterested group of men. Which female segment is the most suitable? – 30-55 years old
Couldn't we have targeted women between 18 and 30 (who also attend New Year's Eve parties)? Yes, of course we could, but we run many email marketing campaigns throughout the year and we can't afford to get oversaturated, so we try to target as narrowly as possible to avoid spam at all costs. Therefore, we decided to victimize women between 18 and 30, since we found that statistically women in this age group buy other types of shoes as a rule.
What about women over 55? Of course, they may be objective, but as in the previous case, many women in this demographic prioritize comfort over design, and statistics from our database show that responses from this demographic are less favored by this type of shoe.
Everything I am telling you is not a “fire-engraved” truth, because it relies heavily on our database and statistics obtained based on our experience (in this case an online shop). What I want you to understand is that you need to ask questions and keep asking questions, that is the only way you will get answers.
I forgot, but it's also important: once you have run your campaign, you won't know the absolute truth, so you need to measure, analyze and compare data from parallel advertising campaigns to optimize your database (eliminate users who haven't opened your emails for a long time, hard bounces, i.e. failed emails that remain as emails forever). That's enough for another post, but the important thing is to understand that this will help you improve your resources (DB) to make your next campaign even more efficient.
