Email Marketing & The Great Debate
Posted by George Palatine on February 12th, 2009
At the 2009 Email Evolution Conference, a room full of email marketing professionals voted on three frequent topics in this industry in order to define what is considered “best practice.” This opening session forum called “The Great Debate” tried to answer the following questions…
1. Do you use a pre-checked or an unchecked opt-in box on your email sign up forms?
2. Do you use single or double opt-in strategy for email list building?
3. Do you remove non-responders from your email list?
Any one of these topics could easily be debated for hours but the consensus in the room was this…
1. Leaving your opt-in box unchecked was the unanimous choice. You need to make people aware that they are signing up to receive your messages. This action needs to be a conscious decision and not simply an oversight of not completely reading an online form.
2. While heavily debated a single opt-in strategy was voted as the defacto best practice in most cases. Understanding that this single opt-in process needs to clearly state what the user will receive (how often is a plus) as a result of their action.
3. To remove or not to remove? This is a question that will plague email marketers forever. As one might expect finding consensus with a room full of industry professionals was no easier then when a marketing manger tries to convince the CEO to trim the list. Ultimately, the voting ended in draw but a few caveats were made. It is generally considered “acceptable” to keep non-responders on your list so long as you communicate with them differently then you do with your actively engaged audience. Develop a customer re-engagement strategy and try to “win back” these inactive members. Move the newly reenergized customers back to your active file and remove the rest.
So let 2009 be the year for better management of your unchecked single opted-in email marketing list.
