Email marketing is the act of sending a specific message to a specific group of people in a business’s database for the purpose of being informational and/or promotional. Email marketing has been around for almost 20 years and is still the most powerful social networking tool available today. However, as technology has changed and people demand more quality and transparency at the same time, email messages have had to adapt to the new rules to still be effective yet remain in compliance with the law. That’s why successful email marketing messages have eight common features in today’s world.
1. From name – This is the displayed name of who the email is from. It’s a requirement that the ‘from name’ is displayed because of spam reasons. In fact, the CAN-SPAM act is the central law where all of these email requirements come from.
2. From email address – This is the email address where the email message came from. Once again this is a requirement that every email must have.
3. Subject line – This is self explanatory about what it is, but it’s good to know that the subject line is limited in length and having certain words like FREE or SPECIAL OFFER in the subject line can trigger spam flags making your email get rejected or filtered into the spam folder of your email provider.
4. Time of day – This is just another requirement and really is helpful with documentation. For instance, as a manager I used to do all of my documentation with email because it time and date stamped my messages.
5. Content – This is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of the email message. The content can be whatever you want it to be. Content can be images, text and links to whatever you want and it can be short or long. There’s no magic formula to putting together a winning combination of content. The key is to always test and track your emails to see which messages get the most response and interaction from your database.
6. Unsubscribe/User preferences – Every email message today from a campaign has to have this link at the bottom that allows users to opt-out from receiving anymore future messages. Bottom line is it’s against the law to NOT have this in your message and all major email marketing companies have this setup already.
7. Privacy policy – Not every campaign email message has this link, but they should. This is another link at the bottom of the message that directs to the privacy policy of the organization. Smart businesses have this in all of their emails.
8. Physical address – Once again, this is a requirement of messages today and most major email marketing companies put the address in your message by default. A real business will have a real address, so this helps with spam.