5 Things to Address in your Email Marketing Pledge

After years, or in some case decades, of receiving floods of spam in their inboxes, your average email marketing campaign prospect can’t be faulted for approaching any subscription signup form with trepidation. Experienced email marketers do everything possible to assuage the fears and anxieties of potential customers, and a mollifying Email Pledge can be a powerful tool in the subscriber-palliation process.

Your Email Pledge is in addition to your conventional privacy guidelines, and should be readily accessible on your signup form boldly linked with a title of "Important Info" or "What You Can Expect". When the prospect clicks on the link, they see a separate page or a popup box which outlines your permission-based covenant. Here are the top five aspects to address in your Email Pledge.

1) Confidentiality - There are very few aspects of email marketing which trigger more wariness among prospects than breach of confidentiality. Your customers have a predominant worry that the personal information they provided to receive information about a product or service from your organization is going to be dispensed to unrelated third parties which are going to instigate a spam deluge.

Your Email Pledge should clearly state that the customer’s information is not going to be sold, shared, or distributed to anyone else for any reason.

2) Frequency - Most of your prospects have signed up for a monthly newsletter from some company or another which ended up appearing in their inboxes twice a week. In order to mitigate any concerns that you’re going to pull a fast one, you should clearly specify your frequency in your Email Pledge. If you can state a particular day of the month they can look forward to your email, your customers will be considerably soothed.

3) Opt-Out - It is important to ensure that your customer knows that they can leave at any time no questions asked, but clear, up-front statements of opt-out policies are becoming even more important with recent legislation being introduced in both the United States and the European Union.

These new laws may make it obligatory to provide this information prior to signup and to delete all traces of a customer’s information at their request. Integrating this policy into your Email Pledge should keep both your customers and the Feds happy.

4) Content - I once unsuspectingly signed up for a local restaurant review newsletter which turned out to not just be peppered with expletives, but contained extremely NSFW images. Your customer has a right to know right up front what kind of content they can expect, so incorporating an outline in your Email Pledge describing what they will receive (and what they won’t) can also help your subscription rates.

5) Contact - Your customers want to know that their enquiries are not going to be rewarded with boilerplate auto-responders or automated assistants.Your Email Pledge should contain an email address that is continuously monitored by customer service specialists who will address the customer’s concerns in a prompt and efficient manner.

If your manpower allows it, including a phone number to call for queries can alleviate a customer’s presentiment that they will be ignored instead of heard.

The best Email Pledges are written in crisp, simple language. So no: This subsection applies if the subscriber fulfills the functions mentioned in paragraphs (f) to (p) of subsection (12) above.

The entire motivation for including an Email Pledge is to make your customers more comfortable in signing up to receive your campaigns, therefore curt, precise, and friendly wording is the key!