Running a mass e-mail campaign without becoming spam

Mass e-mail campaigns and recurring newsletters keep a practice in contact with current and potential clients. Their value depends on whether the business model suits the channel and whether recipients find the contact welcome, useful and appropriately frequent.

Suitability for the practice

Freelancers and consultants with a handful of large-budget, long-term engagements often prefer direct personal contact to manage client relationships. ¹ For a practice with steady client turnover, high-volume, lower-priced services and short timelines, personalised relationship management can be prohibitively time-consuming, making mass e-mail useful. ¹ It can also help a company seeking to build its brand or increase sales volume. ¹

Intrusive marketing can damage credibility with customers and lead to blacklisting by internet service providers. ¹

Campaign practices

Five practices can help a campaign maintain contact without overwhelming recipients: ^{1, 2}

1. Use a professional distribution service supporting opt-ins and opt-outs. Such services can provide templates, response tracking and management of subscriptions, unsubscribe requests and bounced messages. Trustworthy subscription management supports the relationship between the business and its customers.
2. Use a reasonably short, interesting subject line that offers an opportunity to learn or receive something. Keep the message brief, useful and personally relevant, and ensure its content matches the subject line.
3. Leave the recipient wanting more and include a clear call to action, such as a link to a resource or promotion on the company's website.
4. Do not share, rent or trade mailing lists. Selling contact information can undermine trust and increase frustration with e-mail marketing.
5. Match frequency to the services offered, business model and recipients' tolerance, considering the sales cycle, usefulness of the content and frequency of promotions.

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Recipient experience and campaign examples

A health-economics business reported in 2013 that everyone on its approximately 17,500-person distribution list had requested the mailings through a form. ¹ Sending two messages a week, it had received five spam reports across more than five years and seven million messages, alongside many unsubscribes from people who changed their minds. ^{1, 2} Another consultant reported positive feedback on a personal newsletter containing useful material and only a handful of unsubscribe requests after nearly 2,000 messages. ²

Even legitimate marketing can interrupt a recipient's work through the effort of deleting messages or requesting removal from lists, and wasting recipients' time can damage a brand. ² Senders may receive no direct feedback that their messages contribute to information overload: newsletters may instead be automatically discarded or reported as spam. ^{2, 3}