Its a tricky situation: selling your email marketing services and educating your clients about permission based email marketing. Sure you'd love to close the deal, but just because your client's got a fishbowl full of business cards doesn't necessarily make email marketing right immediately.
Whether your using BlinkCampaign, or any other ESPs for that matter, permissions are taken very seriously and most ESPs have a zero-tolerance anti-spam policy.
Permission is simply determined by individuals who has given permission to contact them via email regarding a topic they've explicitly signed up for.
This usually comes in 2 forms:
- mailing list sign up through your client's website
- dropping a business card which states that your client will be contacting them regarding various offers, promotions, etc.
Of course, you'd also need to check out the CAN-SPAM definition for more detailed definitions.
But I've got tons of addresses collected over the net through the years!
So they say. To your client, it may seem that each address is an opportunity cost. However, spammers work on the same principle of throwing a wide net to hook a few. It works (and therefore SPAM is still around) but its not right. Needless to say, it doesn't bode well for your client's reputation as well. ESPs (us included) will cease to support such practices and essentially, you and your client will be back at square one.
Selling the idea and benefits of permission based email marketing
Your client's options may seem limited for the on-start and they have to understand that building a good list takes time. However,with patience and good practice, the benefits or email marketing really start to shine.
Subscriber retention and loyalty
People who have opted in, would usually stay on your list, provided content is relevant to what they've opted in to in the first place. Send your subscribers newsletters if they've signed up for it. Not promotional emails. There's tons more on this in an earlier post.
Hook, line, bait and sinker
As you have more people on your list that are starting to get engaged, they're also likely to be more interested in what you have to say. Soon, further interaction could come in the form of preferences, polls, feedback as well as segmentation by interests or profiles.
Benefits all around
Subscribers get relevant information, your client improves customer relations and loyalty, your services are retained based on excellent reports, and the ESPs continue to deliver timely content on your behalf with less deliverability issues. Its a win-win situation all around.
Take a step back (you, and your client) and have a look at your junk mail folder. You and your client wouldn't want your content to end up there. Its valuable time and money wasted which could've been put to better use in building a solid subscriber list.
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