What is CAN-SPAM?
It means controlling the assault of non-solicited pornography and marketing. The law was introduced to control the epic proportion of spam emails flooding the inboxes of recipients.
From the time email marketing got introduced, many businesses integrated email into their process. But with that, one saw organizations’ misusing this practice to increase sales, sometimes frustrating the recipients. This is one of the reasons why CAN-SPAM came into existence.
What is email productivity?
Most customers would understand the importance of CAN-SPAM. It was implemented in the year 2003, on looking into the convenience of customers. It had a set of rules that states you shouldn’t have an aggressive salesy approach while designing emails. You shouldn’t sugarcoat your message with irrelevant information; it would be a waste of time for the recipients and for you as well.
Moreover, if you’re a growing business, it would affect your brand worth adversely, which is the last thing you would ever want. As a marketer, you have to take each step carefully and implement the best practice that would help your goal and generate results for organization.
Some of the best practices in CAN-SPAM email marketing are:
Subject Lines:
Subject lines are the first point of attraction in an email. This is why marketers develop subject lines that get the instant attention of customers. But some do deviate from exact message leading to confusion among recipients. You shouldn’t mislead the recipients and this is what CAN-SPAM guidelines specify.
Image Courtesy: Yesware
Now this message went into the spam folder of recipient. The reasons are simple; it had content that didn’t meet the standards of CAN-SPAM. For example, if you add too many exclamation points in subject lines, it won’t garner that much attention instead, the outcome would be something like aforementioned example.
Be Honest And Authentic:
Customers nowadays are smart and can sense if anything is wrong. If you aren’t transparent enough, then they might ignore your emails. Now being transparent means, you should include company address at the bottom of emails. When you do so, they know your physical address and with that, you gain their trust.
As no shady business would ever add its physical address. The CAN-SPAM email practice is specifically designed that mandates every business to add their physical address at the bottom of email. The practice might not have completely eradicated the SPAM emails but has significantly reduced the number of spam emails.
Image Courtesy: Campaignmonitor
In this email, you can see the company added physical address.
This practice could increase credibility of your brand; customers now know you’re a genuine organization. If not at present, they would like to acquire your service or product in future.
The CAN-SPAM law has made it necessary to inform the recipient, where the organization is located, and this, if analysed deeply, shows, is the right thing to do to balance the process in business world.
How About Adding Unsubscribe Option?
Including unsubscribe option is the best way to retain serious customers, while removing the non-interested ones.
How often, you faced a scenario where you send emails to customers only to get no response?
Many marketers complain of unresponsive customers that drag down the performance of their email campaigns. Now, you need to think why you want to retain them?
It’s better to give them an option to unsubscribe by including unsubscribe option in emails. Find the below example of unsubscribe option:
Image Courtesy: Campaignmonitor
In this email, you can see the marketer included an unsubscribe option in emails, so that if the recipient feels these emails are irrelevant, they can instantly unsubscribe. This is included in CAN-SPAM law, which gives freedom to recipients to unsubscribe.
An unsubscribe rate below 0.5% is known as a good unsubscribe rate. The other scenario is, too many unsubscribe might be a concern, and you need to check whether you have efficiently segmented your email database.
Unsubscribe option also helps in keeping a pulse on the customers’ requirements and further plan strategy accordingly.
Once marketers understand that, they would attain the ultimate success for their marketing campaign.
Offer Your Recipient To Reply Back:
Customers like to receive messages from brands that offer them an option to reply back. So, if you want to win their trust, send a legitimate email from a proper email address.
Sometimes businesses do send emails with the message “Do not reply,” don’t you think it would affect communication with customers and their viewpoint on your brand?
Customers might state if you want to maintain the conversation flow, why you design emails with “no-reply” message. The ball should be there in their court, whether they want to reply or not to brands’ “from address.”
According to a finding, 43% of users spammed emails as they didn’t recognize the “from” email address, the brand has sent from.
So, you should first maintain relationship with them before sending out crucial messages.
Have A Consistent Email Body Content:
Your email body should have a professional and relevant content conveying your message rightly; otherwise, it means again you aren’t following CAN-SPAM practices.
Contrary to what marketers think, CAN-SPAM helps both marketers and recipients. If you have a precise message, customers can grasp information instantly. The other crucial thing is that you need to mention it clearly that it is an advertisement email so that recipients aren’t disappointed after opening and reading the email. The message should be clear and comprehendible without deviation.
This law is a double-edged sword if leveraged can give positive results or else lead to negative results.
As a marketer, you need to empower your marketing campaign with the best of marketing practices.
Conclusion:
Marketers have seen implementation of many new laws such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR and others that were enforced to make email marketing game a fair play. These rules also look into the concern of consumers, so that they don’t get overwhelmed by unfair practices executed by some organizations.
The more businesses implement it, the better their results, as they would be stopped to attract customers by forceful means.
This blog looks into some best CAN-SPAM email marketing practices that can do wonders for your process.
