Aside from general good practice rules like not sending your emails too often and keeping to a regular schedule – are you 100% confident that your email marketing abides by Australia’s spam laws?

• Did each person on your mailing list opt-in to receive email communication from you?
• Is your business name, address and contact details listed on each email you send?
• Is there unsubscribe details on each email?
• When people unsubscribe do you have procedures to ensure they are not re-added to the list?

Here’s a practical guide put together by the Australian Government (I know! Crazy!) that explains what you need to do to stay on the right side of the law when it comes to Australia’s Spam Act 2003.

It’s a simple to understand guide and I recommend you take a look if you use email marketing within Australia.

And now, for some jargon.

When I’m dealing with email marketing I always make sure my opt-in process is doubled for extra protection.

“Double opt-in” describes the process of signing up to a mailing list, then confirming your decision to subscribe to that list usually by clicking on link sent through a confirmation email. Most reputable email marketing services handle this automatically.

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You can set an alert so that once a day Google will send an email to you with links to articles/blogs/news items that contain your selected phrase. So for example I have a Google Alert for “Online businesswomen” and get sent an email everyday with interesting articles.

ANYWAY

This one just landed in my inbox.

Australian Businesswomen’s Network interview with Annette Lackovic of Presents For Her (presentsforher.com.au).

I’ve never heard of Presents for Her but the part of the interview that caught my eye is what that Annette says about Email Marketing.

I am a huge fan of email marketing and see it as one of the most effective techniques of increasing your websites sales.

The fact that customers take action and give you their permission to receive emails from you indicates they are susceptible to your contact and when implemented correctly, your special offers/products/services.

They are just waiting to purchase from you. It’s a beautiful thing.

Annette sums up the benefits perfectly. Here’s the excerpt I’m talking about:

In your Industry and in your opinion what has been the most successful ‘sales’ thing you have done to date and why do you think it has been so successful?

Our direct ecommerce newsletters are the most powerful and successful tool as they have the highest sales conversion rate based on a ratio of contact:sale.

This is because:

1. Most of the customers on our mailing list are already highly qualified consumers – they have signed up to be a member, have previously purchased from our website or they were referred by a trusted friend or partner.
2. The newsletters always have a strong ’call to action’ campaign, which creates urgency. They also show the huge savings on promotional items advertised.
3. Many consumers regularly need to buy gifts; especially in peak seasons like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and then there are family members’ and friends’ birthdays as well. So it makes it super simple in these peak times as the consumer doesn’t have to fight for car parks in busy shopping centres and wait in check-out queues.
4. The newsletter targets the customer whilst they are already online and takes them immediately to our online shop.

Read the full interview here.

P.S. If you are already using Email Marketing in your business please make sure you’re abiding by the Spam Act 2003.

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Do not send an email marketing campaign to your subscribers with an image promoting your new website and forget to add a link to the site.

This just arrived in my inbox

Looks good, I love a new website. I went to click on the image and it’s not clickable. I looked over the image to find a clickable link to the new website – no luck.

Number one rule of email marketing – always include a link back to your website, don’t make it hard to visit. Closely related to the number one rule of websites – don’t make your visitors think [about what they have to do next or they'll click back].

I had time to click, I didn’t have time to open up a new browser window and type in the URL.

Either someone at County Road is kicking themselves for sending out the email without a link to the website (oh noes!) or they should really look into getting some email marketing help.

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