Business entrepreneurs would often use a combination of different traditional and Internet marketing strategies in order to encourage and entice potential customers and clients to take a look at the products and services that they are offering in the hopes that they would be interested enough to avail of these.  One of the most convenient Internet marketing strategies that are being used by business owners today is email marketing.  While the potential of email marketing has been considered as promising, especially since it was developed as the electronic counterpart of direct marketing campaigns used by multinational corporations for decades, the biggest disadvantage of using email marketing campaigns as a marketing strategy is, its possibility of being recognized by email servers as spam material.

All about Spam

When one refers to spam in Internet marketing terms, this does not refer to the canned luncheon meat that you find in your local grocery stores and supermarkets.  Spam is the term given to emails that have been unsolicited, meaning that the account holder never signed up to get this email in the first place.  These emails are sent in random by companies in order to promote products and services to potential clients and customers.  Instead of this being sent to the account holder’s Inbox, this is sent to the spam folder or junk mail folder. 

The main reason is that the emails used in these campaigns were taken from email mailing lists that are sold by marketing and database companies.  While it is a good idea to use this, especially if you do not have a list of your own, the problem is that what many of these marketing and database companies do not know is that many of those that are listed in these accounts have already reported their frequent receiving of unsolicited promotional offers and other materials from senders that they do not know.  When this happens, the email service provider heightens up the screening process in these accounts to ensure that no spam mail gets directed to their account holder’s Inbox.

In order to ensure that your next email marketing campaign has a low chance of being recognized by these email service providers as a spam mail, here are a few tips to follow.

Make Your Own Mailing List

Business entrepreneurs that have set up an online counterpart of their business would often provide a space in their homepage where visitors can leave their email address to get promotional offers, newsletters and other materials that you may use for your email marketing campaign.  When this is completed, a computer generated email would be sent to the client to verify that he or she is indeed interested in this.  This would help email service providers to allow your email marketing materials to be fed into the Inbox of their account holder. 

Offer “Unsubscribe Me” Option

Although this is the last thing that any business entrepreneur would like to receive, providing potential and existing clients and customers the ability to unsubscribe from your mailing list would lessen the possibility of these customers to report the email address you are using to send email marketing campaigns for your companies.  This is extremely important because having them report the email you are using as an email that is soliciting spam mail, it would make it a lot harder for you to send an email marketing campaign that use the same email service provider.

Use e-Newsletters

E-Newsletters serve as better email marketing campaign materials as opposed to just merely sending product and services offers and discounts.  This is because unlike promotional offers and discounts that merely inform potential clients and customers what you have to offer, e-newsletters are able to educate these clients about your products and services.  Using e-newsletters would help you answer two crucial questions anyone being offered a product or service over the Internet have: why do I need this product or service and why should I buy them from you.  The e-newsletters sent by companies as part of their email marketing campaigns are able to establish their credibility through the high quality articles, tips and reviews that they include.  Also, e-newsletters provide them the ability to subtly advertise their products and services instead of just blatantly offering these to their clients which could greatly increase the chances of the email being used tagged by email service providers as a spam email.