Email Best Practices

Summary: Email is a powerful advertising medium, but it won’t do a thing for your small business unless your messages actually get delivered. The key to avoiding the spam folder? Follow federal CAN SPAM regulations and obtain permission from your recipients.   

We’ve all experienced it before.

You open your email, excited that you have 10 new messages, only to find that nine of the ten are spam emails that you didn’t request.

Frustrated, you just delete anything you feel is unrequested.

As a small business owner, you want to ensure that your emails avoid this fate.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the deliverability of your email is crucial. If you don’t follow certain guidelines, you run the risk of having a higher bounce rate or—even worse—getting caught in a spam filter.

Deliverability is vital to your email marketing success. In order to avoid being labeled spam and ensure the highest possible open rate, there are guidelines that are not only best practices—some are law.

In 2003, Congress passed the CAN SPAM Act to enforce certain rules on email marketing. The law defines commercial email as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.”

For most businesses, these rules—they’re commandments, really—apply to most of the messages you send to prospects.

The top CAN SPAM commandments are as follows:

• You shall not provide false To, From and Reply To information.
• You shall not use false or deceptive subject lines.
• You shall disclose that the email is an advertisement.
• You shall include a valid, physical address or P.O. box
•  You shall provide an opt-out for future emails. (This must have an option to exclude all email communication, although you can also offer opt-outs for certain areas.)
• You shall honor any opt-outs promptly (within 10 business days)

For the details on the CAN SPAM Act and helpful FAQ’s, click here. http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm

It is important to remember that you must also monitor what others are doing on your behalf. For example, if you have a contract company do your email marketing, you are still legally responsible for what they send. If you or someone working on your behalf breaks the law, the penalties can be severe, with fines up to $16,000.

Best practice: Get permission first

Although the CAN SPAM Act doesn’t specify that you must have permission to send someone an email, it is always recommended to do so.

Sending an email without permission can cause severe consequences for your brand, including distrust, and dismissal and deletion of all communication.

Kutenda makes it easy for you to be CAN SPAM compliant with all email messages you send.  An unsubscribe option is automatically inserted at the bottom of each email and when someone chooses this option, Kutenda ensures that they are deleted from email communications. Also, Kutenda prevents duplicate email address, helping you get accurate statistics on the performance of your email campaigns.

Whatever tool or system you use to execute email campaigns, be sure to enforce these best practices. Email marketing is a powerful means to communicate with your customers, and doing so well can bring you much success.