New Email Marketing Restrictions: The Right Way To Stay In Business

The Internet Email Marketing “Slap” is coming! Are You Prepared?

Have you ever heard of the email blackhole?? Well, be ready to hear about it A LOT! ISPs and the big free email providers are changing the guidelines on online marketing and sneaking in new changes that can mean that your emails don’t just finish up in Spam filters, but do not really ever get to the individual’s email address at all..even if they asked for you to email them!

So how will this affect internet email marketing?

Whether or not you finish up in the email blackhole will depend on your internet email marketing history. Have you used “blackhat” tactics and tricks to get folks to open your messages? Have you got a large amount of unsubscribes? Are you employing a free email address making it harder for folk to trace the emails back to you? Are there a lot of complaints about your emails??

If you have got a poor internet email marketing history you may not be in a position to come back from it. Plenty of the ISP’s will simply ban any emails coming from your email address. If you know you have a poor history consider creating a new email address to be your “from” address and start building a solid history from nothing.

The best way to have a “good” internet email marketing history:

1. Do not use sneaky tricks to get folks to open your emails:

If you use “RE:” subject lines that aren’t genuine responses you Will Get BANNED.

An acceptable alternative (for now) is by using “FWD:” it’s much tougher to track as there’ll be no history of the message in the individual’s mailbox, and it increases open rates. Another superb method to increase open rates is to utilise any kind of punctuation at the end of your message line.

2. Ensure content is applicable

You don’t want to be sending out emails which will receive complaints. This is another way to get your Internet email marketing blocked totally. Make sure you have a strong relationship with your list by giving them great e-mails that are on subject with what they want. As an example, if they signed on looking for information on knitting, stick to the knitting subject. Give them quality content in the emails and link to strong articles or videos. You can suggest products now and again, or suggest products thru your articles, but the more topical content you deliver the better.

3. Don’t Hide!

Whatever you do do not use a free email address (i.e. Hotmail, gmail, etc) for your internet email marketing. You need to have your own domain name with an email address attached to the domain. (Learn how to set up a domain, and get traffic in the How to Blog Tutorial) This makes the ISPs trust your emails more as you are less certain to use dodgy tactics that could get you banned if you are sending it from your own domain. It also helps your list remember that they did really sign on to receive mails from you as they can either recognise the domain or can go back and look at it to remind themselves.

By reading this you are ahead of the competition, now make sure you are among the minority that will be in a position to continue Internet email marketing in the new Internet era, and watch as your competition all vanish.

For more tools and whitehat methods for internet email marketing visit The Living Aloud blog with Niamh Arthur.