Email Campaign Software: Creating a Permission List

Email campaign software is a specialized tool used to conduct bulk email marketing or more specifically, an email marketing campaign. The distinction is crucial for this discussion on creating a permission list because of the active word here - permission. Most spammers are surprisingly also considered to be bulk email marketers. After all, they are also just selling products. However, the distinction lies in the fact that a spammer will not ask a prospective customer before mailing him or her to the point of filling up their inboxes. Spammers rely on mailing a mass bunch of people for the few who will actually take the bait. Spammers are not even this specific, what they are satisfied with is just the fact that someone actually opened the mail. The average figures for spammer success rates is something like 15 opens for a million mails that are sent out. One can therefore imagine how many mails it takes for a spammer to sustain.

The other group of bulk email marketers is a more genuine lot that actually get the permission of the people they want to mail and update on products and sales promotions. Once an entire list of people who have expressly stated their desire to receive updates has been created, you have a permission list. From here, it is just a matter of loading it into the email campaign software.

The really difficult part is actually acquiring the permission list itself and an even more arduous task is to maintain it. There are many ways of getting permissions. The first is using the humble registration form during sign-ups. This is a simple act of just adding an extra text field for the email address and the using a checkbox to confirm the decision. It is a good idea to also send a confirmatory mail after this procedure because the real objective is not to be caught by a spam filter. When you send a confirmatory mail, the user is then forced to unmark the mail as spam, making you a friendly sender.

The other ways of getting permission lists is to use the vehicle of surveys to ride proxy on and add the opt-in information as part of the survey results. Yet another method that is available to software vendors is to add the opt-in question as part of the installation wizard.

Once you load the permission list into the email campaign software server, the next task is to maintain it for future use. For this, you must form profiles of the clients so that they are slotted into the correct categories for the correct mails; otherwise, for example, you must just end up selling Viagra to post-menopausal women. After this comes the task of analyzing your tracking reports and understanding the most active members of your permission list. It is important to periodically weed out the members who have been inactive for too long as mailing these people is probably just a waste of internet bandwidth for you.

About the Author
Ron Gomez is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email ( http://www.benchmarkemail.com/email-marketing/email-campaign ) a leading Web and permission-based service for sending and tracking a email campaign.