Best Practices: Honesty is the Best Policy!
If you're thinking of beginning an email marketing campaign, you should remember to treat email consumers with the same respect you'd give to traditional consumers. The honesty and fairness rules that apply to traditional marketing still apply in emails.
Many companies want to use email blasts as a fast, easy way to direct traffic to their site. As a provider of corporate email services for almost 15 years we've seen first hand how effective this can be, however; fast and easy can also lead to laziness and sloppy advertising, something we know you want to avoid.
While it may be tempting to exaggerate claims to drive traffic to your site, email advertising does not provide a free pass for misleading and untrue statements. To write a good, and legal, email advertisement, you must be able to back up all the claims made in your email. This includes product offers, prices, and especially removal requests. Just as in any advertisement the Federal Trade Commission prohibits deceptive or unfair advertising. This includes all out lies, and any attempts to "trick" consumers. This will protect you from personal and legal ill will from the recipients for your emails. Driving traffic to your website is important, but if the customer ends up feeling deceived and violated you'll be doing yourself more harm than good.
Another requirement is that all removal requests must be honored and all removal links and removal email addresses must function as promised. It can be difficult to manage removal requests if you have a large mailing list, that's why at Admail.net we've developed AccuTrak, our premier list management service. This system will manage your removal requests to ensure that you're keeping your recipients happy and remain within the statutes of the law.
Honesty is the best policy when it comes to email marketing. The industry is large and strictly monitored. If you try to lie, trick or abuse your customers, your campaigns will fail and you risk serious legal trouble.