Breakthrough Discovery: A Good Email Campaign

We're all accustomed to being victims of bad email practices. Just last month, Valarie indulged in a little self-therapy by ranting about one of her own experiences. I spend a lot of time inside my inbox weeding out lotto scams, unsolicited product offers, and an increasing number of things I can't talk about on a professional blog. Thank goodness for spam filters.

Problem is, it's not just foreign crooks and unscrupulous pornographers who flood us with garbage. Unfortunately, even the companies from which we invite communications ineptly blast us with email that simply gets tossed—making us reevaluate our relationship with them. That being the case, I tend to take notice when I see good email practices.

Such was true when I recently saw a missive in my inbox from a service I occasionally use. For starters, they don't send out email that often; in fact, the lead paragraph noted they "actually haven’t sent this newsletter in quite a while." Apparently, they want to increase the frequency of their mailings, but wanted to contact me before doing so. Why? They wanted to notify me that their opt-in language has changed; they also wanted to give me the option of opting out of new mailings.

In other words, they notified me of a change I probably wouldn't notice and unnecessarily asked me if I wanted to change my mind as a result. That's awesome. Just for that, I'm going to let them keep sending me stuff—for a while, at least. As far as I'm concerned, that's going the extra mile to please your market.

Granted, you could argue otherwise by saying it required little effort and was just an attempt to adhere to upcoming CAN-SPAM requirements, but I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy. I also tend to think that bad behavior proliferates because good behavior is seldom rewarded.

If email campaigns are part of your wider marketing efforts, use them wisely. You might retain some customers and get noticed.