Email Marketing Basics & Best Practices

If you’re new to email marketing, we should go over some basic principles before you
start sending campaigns. We’ll go over best practices, legal issues, and how to measure
your overall performance...
The Definition of Spam
If you get an unsolicited email from someone you don’t know, is that spam? Not
necessarily. If you get an email that was obviously sent to a whole list of people, is that
spam? Not necessarily. So what’s spam?
Spam is when you send an unsolicited email to a whole list of people.
So let’s say you just bought a list of email addresses from some local business
organization. These are great prospects for your business, right? You want to send them
an email with a relevant offer they can’t refuse…
It’s spam if you upload that list into MailChimp (or any other email service provider like
us) and send that list an unsolicited email.
It’s not spam if you take that list, and write personal, one-to-one emails to each
recipient, and the content is unique for each recipient.
If your immediate reaction is, “but what if…” you will probably get yourself reported for
spamming. You simply cannot send unsolicited email to a list of people you don’t know.