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Email Marketing Precautions
by Mary Beth Guard, BOL Guru
BIO AND CONTACT INFO

QUESTION: Any precautions to consider with email marketing?

ANSWER: Here are some suggestions:
  • Determine whether you're going to be sending the emails to customers (or prospective customers) who live within a single state, or multiple states. Check the state laws to see if there are anti-spam laws. If so, carefully abide by those restrictions.
  • Avoid using subject lines that sound like spam. Think long and hard about what the subject line should say that is interesting enough to make people want to click, but not cheesy enough to turn them off.
  • Give recipients a simply way to unsubscribe to your list if they choose to do so. It's the polite and professional thing to do.
  • Monitor your returned mail carefully. You may find that some of the wording in your email may be interpreted as spam by a recipient's Internet Service Provider and may thus be blocked. Or you may even get blocked by a virus protection program (can you imagine?) if certain words are used. We learned that the hard way recently when one of our BOL Tech Advisory emails got blocked by some virus programs simply because, in describing the characteristics of the most recent worm infecting computers around the world, we explained what the subject line of the infected emails would say! This week, Harvard reported that emails it had sent to notify applicants of their admission were inexplicably blocked by AOL. Review which emails are coming back and why in order to avoid the problem in the future.
  • Provide contact information and links.
  • Abide by the compliance-related requirements for advertisements, from inclusion of Member FDIC wording (if you're advertising a deposit-related product), to the Equal Housing Lender logo on home loans.
  • Carefully consider how the email looks. Is it consistent with your other marketing materials? Does it project the image you want to project?
  • Test the email message before you officially send it out by sending it to in-house recipients who are using different email programs. Make sure it looks right in each one.

First published on BankersOnline.com 1/7/02
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