What's in it for me?

Every email campaign is launched after answering the question, “What's in it for me?” The revenue benefits for the campaign, business relationships established, and simple needs to meet quota are all thoughts that pass through the mind of senders. All of this causes us to send emails from time to time that cause low open rates, high rates of unsubscribes, or worse spam complaints. The question that you should ask yourself before you hit the send button is "What's in it for the subscriber?" At the end of the day it is the recipient of your email that determines if it was successful. If you can't define what benefit your subscribers have in receiving your email, then you shouldn't send it. If your email is sent with careful thought of who the audience is, it will be well received, have higher open rates, encourage continued reading of your publications, and encourage passing the message on to potential subscribers. The fundamental idea here is relevancy.

The definition that email senders have of spam doesn’t match the definition your subscribers have. Where you see a “mark as spam” button, what your subscriber sees is a “Mark as irrelevant” button, at least according to David Greer of Campaign Monitor. ISPs would seem to share this view:

Yahoo! Mail - Miles Libbey: Anti-spam product manager

Operationally, we define spam as whatever consumers don't want in their inbox.

AOL - Charles Stiles: AOL Postmaster

"I don't care if they've triple opted-in and gave you their credit card number," said Stiles, drawing chuckles, but making his point loud and clear: Relevance rules, and catering to end user preferences is his top priority.

Microsoft/Hotmail - Craig Spiezle: Online safety evangelist

We need to think really a step beyond opt-in and focus on the consumer's expectations, relevancy, and frequency.

Gmail - Brad Taylor: Google Engineer

Sometimes people are afraid to report a message because they aren't sure if it is "really" spam or not. Our opinion is that if you didn't ask for it and you don't want it, it's spam to you, and it should be reported.

If your email has high complaint rates, you will be blocked because it is viewed as unwanted email. If you send to old addresses and hit spam traps, you are sending emails to people that haven't even asked for it. The primary concern for the receiving server is to protect their users from unwanted mail. Of course you are thinking, "they signed up for my mailing list, so my mail isn't unwanted". ISPs and the anti-spam community at large (which includes the network administrators that put corporate blocks in place) no longer consider permission to be permanent. If a subscriber has lost interest in your emails, got transferred to a different division in the company, retired, or simply didn't approve of an email that you sent to them, in the eyes of the ISPs and corporate net admins you no longer have permission to send emails to those subscribers. Trying to hold onto these addresses through difficult unsubscribe mechanisms, poor list hygiene standards, and other means merely exacerbates the problem and will eventually lead to blocking and blacklisting.

Every email that you send is a chance to see what your audience finds relevant. Open rates, unsub rates, click rates, and complaint rates all offer information on what content your subscribers find relevant, and equally important, what they find irrelevant. Relevancy requires vigilance to determine what you should be sending, to whom, and how often. If a particular email causes high complaint and unsubscribe rates, then you should think twice about sending similar content.