As a business, we may get tempted with the possibility of buying out a large (cheap) database of email ids and sending them promotional emails in the hope of registering a less-than-one-per-cent conversion. The costs are so minimal, it’s totally worth it, right? Wrong.

The cornerstone of any communication with your customer is permission, and many organizations ignore this golden rule.

Back when I was Business Head at Experian, we organized an industry event to help prospects and clients grasp the essentials of the Email Marketing business. What followed is a BusinessWorld feature entitled Don’t Cry For Email Yet, based on discussions with your’s truly. Here is an excerpt that you can use as a guideline of best practices, if you are just starting out with Email Marketing…

• Don’t spray and pray! Spamming inboxes with bulk mails will not work. The economics might initially seem attractive. But in the long run, there is reputational damage so permission-based email marketing works best.
• Make sure the email is integrated with Mobile. 69 per cent mobile users delete if an email does not open properly on their mobile screens.
• Test your email before sending it out – Most successful email marketers test the subject line and content on a sample group before they send mass mailers. Only if the subject line arouses enough interest for a user to open it, does it get sent out.
• Don’t put out irrelevant stuff. Most email marketers don’t realize the damage they do to their brands when they cross-market and put out stuff that is totally irrelevant to user.
• Always have an unsubscribe option. Global best practices of permission-based email marketing is that they need to give users a choice.
• Avoid spam traps. The minute an email marketer sends emails to an email account that has not been used for long, he gets identified as a spammer.
• Never purchase mailing lists – This largely applies to markets like India where most such data is not quite above board.

Read the entire article, here.