Email marketing is an effective means to drive sales and build relationships with customers. However, the consequences of poor mailing list management can have your email classified as spam, which can be detrimental to your brand.
It may be tempting to purchase someone else’s mailing list to increase your reach to potential customers, but recipient complaints as well as blacklisting as spam can result in your hosting account being suspended.
So how do you effectively communicate with your customers while maintaining business best practice? Here are a few key dos and don’ts to assist you:
DON’T: Buy mailing lists
The use of purchased mailing lists or gathering email addresses supplied for any other purpose is a contravention of xneelo’s Acceptable Use Policy, and could lead to the suspension of your account.
DO: Implement double opt-ins
Simply requiring your would-be customer to sign up for your mailing list is no longer sufficient when it comes to mailing list best practice. To ensure your customer hasn’t accidentally signed up or been added without consent, you’ll need to send them a clickable confirmation email, which they’ll then need to reply to be added to your list.
DON’T: Take advantage of in-house cross-selling
Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that if a consumer has signed up for one brand or product’s newsletter, sending them correspondence from other similar brands or products is fair game. However, under the POPI (Protection of Personal Information) Act, you’re only legally allowed to send commercial mail to customers who have given you explicit permission to do so, and you could be asked to provide opt-in evidence as proof. E.g clients whose details were collected while involved in banking may not be sent mail advertising insurance. The solution is to offer opt-in options for your other brands, giving consumers the option to sign up for additional communications.
DO: Add a visible ‘remove’ or ‘unsubscribe’ link
To avoid being flagged as a spammer, ensure that you include an ‘unsubscribe’ link in the body of your email – preferably somewhere easily accessible. Once this link has been clicked, it’s imperative that the email address is immediately removed from your mailing list.
DON’T: Send more than 500 emails per hour
Our Shared hosting packages have a mail-sending quota limit of 500 mails per hour, as the processing of large amounts of mail adversely affects Web server performance. If it is necessary for you to send mail to more than 500 recipients within an hour, we would advise that you consider upgrading to a Managed Server with xneelo, where you have full use of all the server resources.
