How to Manage Your Mailing List

“One day you are in, the next you are out!” according to Heidi Klum from Project Runway. The same is true for your email marketing list if you are not careful!

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to communicate with your customers and prospects. Unfortunately, it is also a marketing function that quickly fills up our inboxes. For the emails I have agreed to receive, that's fine, but for all those that come in unexpected, and in many cases, unwelcome, the unsubscribe feature is my best friend.

The truth is the ability to easily unsubscribe is a government requirement on email marketing messages, along with a host of other requirements that are supposed to keep our inboxes clear of solicitations and SPAM. As recipients this is a great thing, as email marketers, it is a rule we need to adhere to.

CAN-SPAM Act – for your protection

There are several pieces of the CAN-SPAM Act that outline how emails in a marketing campaign need to be presented in order to not be officially considered SPAM. However, just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, SPAM is in the eye of the receiver, and people have different definitions of what they consider SPAM; from unexpected emails, to ones that include promotions for items they don't want, and beyond. The best you can do is adhere to the rules so that everyone on your email marketing list is there by choice, which is greatly reduce the risk of any of them reporting your message as SPAM.

Let's take a look at a few of the Opt-Out elements of the CAN-SPAM Act.

1. The recipient must be able to opt-out for at least 30 days after you send your message.

2. The sender must “honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days.”

3. There can be no fee to opt-out.

4. There can be no additional personal information required to opt-out. (You can ask for a reason, but cannot require it.)

5. There cannot be any additional steps “other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website” to opt-out.

6. Once someone has opted-out of your mailing list, “you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.”

(Read all the rules of the CAN-SPAM Act).

Email service providers take the guesswork out of the CAN-SPAM Act and make sure that you adhere to every line of it. Once someone has opted-out of your mailing list, that email address is marked DO NOT SEND. The email service provider will not allow you to send to that email address again, unless the person re-subscribes by using the same link they used to unsubscribe.