Are You Spamming Your Email List?

Everyone hates spam. Marketers know this better than anyone. But the reality of today's business environment is driving marketers to send more and more email messages. Budgets are tight and email is free. And more and more people are seeking and obtaining their news and information online. So it just makes sense.

If you are like me, you have signed up for all kinds of websites and enewsletters over the years. My inbox fills up every day with emails that I have supposedly asked to receive. Its too much. It borders on spam. But I asked for this right? So when do opt in emails become spam? How do you actually define spam anyway?

Typically, it seems spam is defined in terms of the sender -- spam is an email sent by a faceless, nameless individual to people who didn't ask to receive it. Fair enough. But there is a legal form of spam that is only getting worse -- Opt-in Email Assault or "OEA" as I call it.

We have all been victims of OEA. You know how it goes. You are forced to register with a web site and in the process they ask you if you want to receive email updates. "Sure, why not." And then it starts. Two emails the first day. Four the second day. Six by the third day. By day three you aren't even deleting their emails, but the view pane in your email opens it so the marketer on the other side is all excited because 40% of his recipients are opening his email.......

As marketers, we often assume that if a user has signed up and opted-in to our emails that we have all the permissions we need to reach out to those users whenever we want.

So what is the right number of emails to send to your user base, you may ask? When does it become spam? Answer: when the user decides your emails are not valuable or relevant.

For a recipient, spam has much less to do with the number of emails and everything to do with the relevancy of the information to the user. If the user wants each and every one of your emails because they find them useful or informative, then it isn't spam. If you send them dozens or hundreds of messages they don't want, users will consider it spam.

Here's a formula:
Limited number of emails of Low Relevancy = Slight Annoyance
High number of email of Low Relevancy = Spam

The trick is providing valuable content and understanding the interests and needs of your user base. Users are now expecting to control the ways marketers communicate with them. It is now on the users terms and if you don't allow them to choose those terms, you risk frustrating or alienating your users. The more specific and specialized you can be, the more relevant and valuable your emails will be. Here are a few rules to follow with your opt in email lists.

Allow your users to:

1. Tell you as specifically as possible what kind of information they want to receive.

2. Determine how often they want to receive messages from you.

3. Determine through which channels you communicate with them.

Email is such a frustration for people, if you add to that frustration it can only hurt your brand.