7 Rules of 'Engaged' Email Marketing

Growing your offline or online business using mass email marketing can be very cost effective. In the old days, at the beginning times of using email as a way to improve your companies bottom line, mass email marketing was born. The power of getting your companies offer in front of millions became a company mindset. Using the power of the internet, you can literally reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers all with the click of a button.

As businesses sought to capitalize on increasing profits using mass email marketing, untargeted email recipients began to be flooded with 'spam' or unsolicited bulk commercial emails. The term 'SPAM' was born. This flooding of unwanted emails to the general public created a huge backlash. Naturally, this public backlash led to the creation of new laws to prevent unwanted email messages, the CAN SPAM laws. In a nutshell, these laws sought to prevent unwanted email recipients from receiving your companies offer. These 'untargeted' recipients led to new anti-spam rules.

In order to be in compliance with these new anti-spam laws, your emails must adhere to the following rules.

1 - As the sender of the email, you must put an actual physical address for you or your company. This is self-explanatory.

2 - The subject line of your email must be accurate and relate to the actual content of your email. In order to create an 'engaged' email recipient that the search engines are looking for, the content of your email must be directly related to the subject line. An engaged reader that actually opens your email will do wonders for your search engine rankings.m

3 - The email message must have an accurate 'from' heading where you put in the name of you or your company.

4 - You cannot have a false header on your email. For example, a header containing an image of 'CNN' from a spamming email marketer that has nothing to do with CNN, in an attempt to establish credibility to entice the recipient to open the email.

5 - If you email contains adult content make sure it is clearly labeled.

6 - Your email must provide a clear, free 'unsubscribe' link for the recipient to be immediately unsubscribed from your email list and never receive another email from you.

7 - Provide an opt-in offer to your recipient to agree to receive your emails in exchange for your offer. A free report or some type of value based content in order to 'engage' your recipient is vital.

These are the basics of the new CAN SPAM laws. These new rules are not necessarily a deterrent to your companies sales campaigns. If the requirements are studied, and you take the time to incorporate the requirements into your email campaigns the new requirements will actually improve your 'engagement' rate and your search engine rankings. And if you improve your rankings, you will improve your sales.