The Whitelist

CAN SPAM. Love it or hate it, it serves a purpose. The real problem isn’t the legislation itself, it’s the fact that we need it in the first place because so many email marketers don’t live up to the standards of email marketing vendors like ClickMail and email marketing people like you.

But the unsubscribe option—required by CAN SPAM—isn’t all bad. Sure it lets people opt out of your email marketing in-house list, but guess what? If they’re opting out, you don’t want to be marketing to them anyway. They’re actually doing you a favor because they’re helping you figure out what’s working and what’s not in your permission-based email marketing initiatives.

Think of the unsubscribe as a metric you can use to measure how well you’re serving your target audience. As we’ve noted in another blog post, an increase in your unsubscribe rate can indicate that you’re over-messaging your audience.

Sometimes we get so focused on email delivery and fancy email marketing tools and choosing the next great email provider that we lose sight of the most important piece of the email marketing puzzle: the customer.

Next time you’re reviewing your email marketing data, don’t frown when you see the unsubscribes, but smile. This is data, data you can use to improve your email marketing campaigns. Keep track of your unsubscribe rate, notice when it goes up or down, do your A/B testing, and improve, improve, improve. Always be relevant to your audience and learn to love those who opt out. They’re teaching you a lesson you can apply to increase your email marketing ROI. How great is that?

Tags: CAN SPAM, Email marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Deliverability, Direct marketing, Reputation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.