Best practices or required practices

What really are the best practices for email?

A year ago I wrote a post about best practices and how most of my best practices were different from what other people recommend. I don’t talk about rules for frequency or subject line length. I don’t focus on best practices for bounce processing or content length.
BestPracticesBallMy best practice recommendations are really about process.

  • Send only opt-in mail.
  • Send mail correctly.
  • Identify yourself in email.
  • Honor unsubscribe requests.

The rest is all about the relationship between senders and their recipients.

But what does that mean?

It means that every sender should know who their audience is. Send mail that audience wants. If they want mail daily? Send daily. If they want mail weekly, send weekly. You’re the expert on who your audience is. Without knowing more about that audience no one should be giving you advice on anything like content or cadence or call to action or subject line length or whatever. Those are really specific to each program.

That sounds complicated.

Well, it’s not intro level deliverability that’s for sure.
Really knowing your audience isn’t something every company can, or even should, do. For many companies email is a part of their business, but isn’t really what they do. Email is a tool, and as long as that tool is working and deliverability is good there doesn’t need to be a commitment to really figuring out how to use it. Other companies, though, are built around email. Email is vital to their sales process or their customer communication process. In these cases, it is a good idea to commit the resources to improving delivery and email processes to get the best results.

Does it work?

It does! Look at what Louis C.K. did with his marketing. He broke all the rules, but made his audience happy. He knows his audience and he knows his brand and he carries that into his email campaigns. Other folks who “broke the rules” include Groupon and other daily deal sites. They broke the “rule” of no daily email except those users want the daily emails. Do daily emails work for everyone? Nope. But they work for some.
Lately I’ve been working with clients who start out with good deliverability, but are looking for some assistance with tweaking their strategy. It’s a challenge to think about what tweaks we can do to make a good program better. I’ve also been talking with other experts in the field and realizing that there is a place for advanced deliverability recommendations. What works in one vertical may not work in another. In some cases, other restrictions (privacy laws in some jurisdictions) may make common best practices not work or a worst practice.

How are you going to help?

We’ve always had a lot of plans for sharing more information. The blog is a big part of that, but we’re looking at other channels and things. I think some good things are going to come out of this and am excited to share them with you over the coming year.
 

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People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

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Would you buy a used car from that guy?

There are dozens of people and companies standing up and offering suggestions on best practices in email marketing. Unfortunately, many of those companies don’t actually practice what they preach in managing their own email accounts.
I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a company handling large volumes of emails.  It’s clear that time and energy was put into the technical setup of the send. If only they had put even half that effort into deciding who to send the email to. Sadly, they didn’t.
My first thought, upon receiving the mail, was that some new, eager employee bought a very old and crufty list somewhere. Because Strongmail has a reputation for being responsible mailers, I sent them a copy of the email to abuse@. I figured they’d want to know that they had a new sales / marketing person who was doing some bad stuff.
I know how frustrating handling abuse@ can be, so I try to be short and sweet in my complaints. For this one, I simply said, “Someone at Strongmail has appended, harvested or otherwise acquired an old email address of mine. This has been added to your mailing list and I’m now receiving spam from you. ”
They respond with an email that starts with:
“Thank you for your thoughtful response to our opt-in request. On occasion, we provide members of our database with the opportunity to opt-in to receive email marketing communications from us.”
Wait. What? Members of our database? How did this address get into your database?
“I can’t be sure from our records but it looks like someone from StrongMail reached out to you several years ago.  It’s helpful that you let us know to unsubscribe you.  Thank you again.”
There you have it. According to the person answering email at abuse@ Strongmail they sent me a message because they had sent mail to me in the past. Is that really what you did? Send mail to very old email addresses because someone, at some point in the past, sent mail to that address? And you don’t know when, don’t know where the address came from, don’t know how it was acquired, but decided to reach out to me?
How many bad practices can you mix into a single send, Strongmail? Sending mail to addresses where you don’t know how you got them? Sending mail to addresses that you got at least 6 years ago? Sending mail to addresses that were never opted-in to any of your mail? And when people point out, gently and subtly, that maybe this is a bad idea, you just add them to your global suppression list?
Oh. Wait. I know what you’re going to tell me. All of your bad practices don’t count because this was an ‘opt-in’ request. People who didn’t want the mail didn’t have to do anything, therefore there is no reason not to spam them! They ignore it and they are dropped from your list. Except it doesn’t work that way. Double opt-in requests to someone has asked to be subscribed or is an active customer or prospect is one thing. Requests sent to addresses of unknown provenance are still spam.
Just for the record, I have a good idea of where they got my address. Many years ago Strongmail approached Word to the Wise to explore a potential partnership. We would work with and through Strongmail to provide delivery consulting and best practices advice for their customers. As part of this process we did exchange business cards with a number of Strongmail employees. I suspect those cards were left in a desk when the employees moved on. Whoever got that desk, or cleaned it out, found  those cards and added them to the ‘member database.’
But wait! It gets even better. Strongmail was sending me this mail, so that they could get permission to send me email about Email and Social Media Marketing Best Practices. I’m almost tempted to sign up to provide me unending blog fodder for my new series entitled “Don’t do this!”

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