Respect for subscribers is often absent from many email marketers' programs, as Andrew Kordek pointed out in a recent post “Respect in email.”
I concur that respect is important, but it's not enough to command that marketers respect their subscribers. Respect begins when you manage expectations at the start of the subscriber relationship.
Managing expectations means adopting a "no-surprises" policy. This means you make it clear up front how the opt-in process works. State what kind of content they signed up for and how often you'll send it. Put as much control as you can into your subscribers' hands.
Then, honor the expectations with the emails that you send. The mismatch – accidental or deliberate – between what a subscriber expects and what you actually send is what drives spam complaints, unsubscribes and disengagement.
Common Expectations
While we are all different, the following are typical things your subscribers expect from your brand and email program and where they have likely been disappointed before:
1. Privacy/Permission: You won't share their email addresses or data with other companies unless you state that up front and get their express permission to do so.
2. Brand: Your brand will be visible immediately in the inbox so subscribers can recognize it. They don’t want to have to guess what that acronym means or creative name you’ve come up for your newsletter.
3. Other communications: Unless they agreed to let you share their name with third parties or other groups within your company, they don't expect to receive email from them.
4. Content: If they signed up for a best practices/trends newsletter, they don't expect to get aggressive sales-oriented messages and could mark those as spam.
5. Frequency: Subscribers to an email called "The Weekly Digest" do not expect to suddenly start receiving the "Daily Deals" email from you. Of if you send 3-4 times during the year but then double or triple that frequency during the holidays, you will likely pay dearly in unsubscribes and spam complaints.
6. Format: Today, most people expect to receive an HTML email (even if they don't know what that means), though some prefer text for their mobile phone or other reasons. They will also expect that you give them the choice of formats or let them know the format if you don't offer options.
7. Subscription management: Savvy email consumers expect to subscribe, unsubscribe, change addresses or preferences, contact company reps or offer feedback without searching your Web site. Put all this information in an administrative area (typically in the footer) in each email.
8. Relevance and personalization: Most people are willing to share a certain amount of personal information with you, if they trust you won't abuse it and they believe they will receive value in return.
Explain why you ask for sensitive information such as a birth date, postal address or household income. If you ask for birth date, for example, I expect either a birthday email or that the emails I receive will be personalized based on my age range. (The exception being if you ask for legal reasons: alcohol, firearms, etc.)
