Midwest Drycleaning & Laundry Institute www.MWDLI.org / 765-969-5745 9 Offering a piece of information potential customers might want is another way to collect e-mail addresses. Many companies will require an e-mail address and name before providing access to a PDF or video they know customers will want to see. By doing this they now have the legal ability to send marketing e-mails to these people. Called “warm leads,” these customers have established an interest in the company’s products or services by willingly providing this information in exchange for something they want. It is also imperative to include an opt-out or “unsubscribe” link. Most online e-mail providers include this feature with their service. Subject Lines Volumes have been written about how to write effective subject lines. The best advice here is to keep it short, simple and to the point. Your subject line is critical for legal reasons, to gain the readers’ attention, and to get your message past SPAM filters. The subject line must reference the content of the e-mail in order to comply with anti-SPAM laws. Your subject cannot promise something and then not deliver it. A free, online subject line tester can determine if your message will get through the SPAM shield set up by most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and users. DLI currently u s e s h t t p : / / w w w. l o c a l n e w s . b i z / s u b j e c t L i n e / ValidateSubjectLine.asp. In the early days of e-mail marketing no message was rejected. Then SPAM rose in prevalence. ISPs set up SPAM filters to help reduce the amount of unsolicited mail and governments began regulating the content of bulk, unsolicited e-mail. If a user set their SPAM filters to the “Strong” setting only messages with the proper credentials would get through. Some e-mail reader programs allow users to train the system as to what Junk Mail is and what is good. In the first few days or weeks of use, the user identifies Junk items and the program gathers data on usage. Once enough data is collected the program generally does an acceptable job at filtering messages. However, no SPAM filter is perfect. Sometimes important messages go to the wrong place. Most users have learned to quickly scan their Junk Mail boxes. There are many dos and don’ts to the art of Subject Line writing. The best way to learn is to plug your proposed subject line into a tester and revise it until it comes back green across all the categories. Over time you’ll learn what filters look for and how to avoid using those terms. The short course involves not capitalizing the first letter of each work and avoiding common SPAM terms such as “Free”, “Buy”, “Now,” “Sale,” and “All,” among a host of others. An Internet search can be very helpful in providing more information on this topic. Frequency Purchasing just one item from some stores can result in a never-ending deluge of m a r k e t i n g e - m a i l s , frequently coming in more than once each day. This must be working for some of the larger companies or they would have ceased this practice long ago. DLI sends messages about once or twice a day but very few of them are sales- based. Many users decide this is intrusive and prefer fewer messages. Some companies actually offer a decreased sending option so users can receive messages less frequently. Timing Matters There is no right time to send a marketing-based e-mail message. Fact is, most people don’t really care. While the sender and subject line are vastly important, when your message arrives also has a lot to do with how many of your recipients will actually open it. The traditional advice has been Tuesday to Thursday between 8 and 10 a.m. However things are always in flux in the online world and several companies have found success in challenging this.