Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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Posted: 31 Oct 2012 09:45 AM PDT

Some of our lead generation clients on the PAR Program have had a bit of a spam issue… Most of these clients are pumping in thousands of new users a day. Even though all users double opt in we still have ran into some spam issues.

By just implementing a few small things we have seen complaints reduce to as much as 1/10th of what they were.

First, I would just like to explain why people are reporting spam.

Every major email service (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc) has made the spam button so prevalent that a lot of people use it as the delete button. Why do they do this? Well the obvious reason is it helps them score spam… or so they have you believe. The biggest reason is that email service providers get an enormous amount of fees from services that white list people. We use these types of services with our PAR Program for all of our clients.

The first trick is to place a non-intrusive disclaimer at the top of every email.

I just want you to know that I have spent an enormous amount of time to put together these emails for you. If at any time you no longer find them valuable just click here and you will never get email from me again.

See what I did there? Not only do I give people a VERY easy way to unsubscribe, I also let them know that I put a lot of effort into crafting these emails. This lets people know you care and you don’t want to bother them if they do not find them of value. The wording varies from client to client and you can experiment with this a bit.

The second trick is to make a button or link at the bottom of your emails that says “Is this spam? Report it!”.

The button would do the exact same thing as the unsubscribe but, it gives the user who feels as if they are being violated to take action against you and report spam!

Again, you will want to play around with the wording.

But, being too careful can cause subscribers to unsubscribe from your newsletter that did not want to.

One thing we have found is you always have the “law of averages” that people will accidentally click on links that will unsubscribe them from your newsletter. We first discovered this when people were emailing the site owners asking to be resubscribed to the newsletter. As surprising as that sounds it’s pretty amazing how many responses there were.

Think about this for a second. The people that “accidentally” unsubscribed found your newsletter so valuable that they took the time to investigate how to contact you and get resubscribed to your newsletter.

So how do you combat that?

It’s simple! On your unsubscribe page let the user know you are sad to see them go and that they will never recieve emails from you again. But, let the user know that if they “hit” unsubscribe by accident the steps on how they can resubscribe. With the PAR Program we not only give you the flexibility to design this page but, we also do not make people fill out a form again to resubscribe. The user will also resume in the newsletter sequence right where they left off.

I am not sure of any other service that does this but, please go ahead and leave a comment below if you do.

Hopefully these tips help you drastically reduce your spam complaints and keep your newsletter from getting kicked off of email services.