Opt in email marketing: permission is required

It took long enough for email marketing to prove to be a successful mean of advertising and promotion. It took about a decade to make businessmen trust into email marketing as one of the marketing approaches, which is considerable cheaper and demands less time to be performed. During this time basic technologies and rules were formed. One of such rules is permission opt in, which already became a key standard for many email marketers around the world, who really appreciate the advantages of it.

It is already wide known that permission based email marketing is much more successful and presupposes a greater positive feedback then the email marketing campaign, which doesn’t consider permission. But for a huge number of email marketers the issue of permission still remains an issue, they are arguing about. That means that a lot of email marketers didn’t discover the great usability of permission based email marketing. Why is it so?

Other marketing channels influence a lot on adopting the principle of permission in email marketing practice. Not all of them require permission. That allows beginners in email marketing think that if permission is not necessary while using radio, TV, printed materials or direct mail it still could be missed in email marketing too. Of course they get good enough results without permission too, but while comparing these results with results achieved by email marketing based on permission it differs a lot. Is average your level and is the top of your email marketing goal?

The main feature of permission based email marketing is in attitude towards your mailings from the part of receivers. People do really appreciate the information they want to hear from you. Here are the advantages you can benefit from if using email marketing primarily based on permission:

• better response rates
• increased trust and brand affinity
• better deliverbility

Most email marketers, who do not consider using permission, are afraid to spend extra money and time to create a valuable permission-based email list and create highly targeted and relevant email messages. But this is indisputably worth those money and time spenditure. You should always remember the size of email marketing list has nothing common to email marketing campaign, but something that is really answerable for it is the quality of email marketing list. Permission allows you to build a strong and trustworthy relationship between you and your customers and subscribers. Thus the responses you get with permission are around five times better then those without permission. So if you can make better results with considerably low expenditures will you still want to be on average?

Permission tricks.

What else you should know about permission is that not all kind of permission has the same effect. Two different kind of permission can be identified: expressed and implied. While the first case shows the initiative from the part of user, the second variant of permission – implied permission – presuppose a silent consent. Expressed permission presupposes user itself to express his / her desire by checking the blank boxes, thus making his / her choice. Prechecked boxes may be unchecked, but in most cases they remain checked; therefore the choice was already done before and user only has to agree with it or not. In second case the actions look like mechanical and as the result larger number of opt-outs is observed.

So, the only best variant is to choose expressed permission, which also has its own particularities. The term opt-in is the equivalent of the term permission. Opt in can be single or double. After single opt in the subscriber is automatically added to the database, while double opt in procedure requires an extra confirmation through email or through any other means specially designed for this purpose.

Permission-based opt-in advantages

• 1. A considerable increase of open rates is noticed after you switch form opt-out to opt-in email marketing. The raise from 0.5%-3% to 5% or even 10% and more definitely is an advantage.
• 2. Unsolicited email will never guarantee you your email message will be read by receiver. While getting unsolicited emails recipients are more likely to delete it. Recent findings show how important permission is to succeed in email marketing. Only 5% of recipients are eager to read an unsolicited email and 61% will be curious about solicited email and probably will read it. Here is the chart:

Permission and Unsolicited Email

	Permission	Unsolicited
Curious to read it	48%	16%
Eager to read it	13%	4%
Indifferent	30%	3%
Open it “Somewhat annoyed”	7%	76%
Delete it without reading it	2%	1%

• 3. Unsolicited emails create annoyance even if email isn’t spam. Thus sending unsolicited emails can influence negatively on potential new customers desire to buy your products.
• 4. People are more likely to open emails from people whom they know and trust. Most of respondents replied that they open commercial emails because they recognize the brand name, what means they will not consider opening emails from somebody they don’t know.
• 5. Recent case studies discovered that the higher level of privacy is the higher intention to open that email message the subscriber has.
• 6. CTR’s are much higher on house lists, because of trust, subscribers show towards email marketer. Still the results may vary from type of list: B2B or B2C.
• 7. AOL users are more likely not to unsubscribe due to double opt-in option. Single opt-in procedure results about 22% of unsubscribes, while double opt-in procedure only about 8%.
• 8. After “Report as spam” was added to AOL 8.0 its users were more likely to report unsolicited emails as spam. The number of such reports almost doubled, because people consider reporting as one of ways to stop unsolicited emails.

Permission email also makes sense because you save money while use it. Denying opt-in you spend money at people who are not interested in you, your products and services. Thus the benefits of using permission-based email marketing are obvious, but you are the only one who decides to use this practice or not.

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 : Email Marketing : No Comments