What is ethical email marketing?
You're not the first one scratching their head, trying to understand what this term is all about.
Let's start with the 3 pillars of ethical email marketing:
Transparency
Has different meanings for different brands, which is fantastic.
As long as you're having a conversation about it, you're already a few steps ahead of the competition.
Transparency for one brand can look like the founder's shower thoughts. Or you can share the BTS of your new product. Or you can decide that you're sharing very little on your personal life, and a lot about the strategy of your business.
Keep this in mind:
- transparency increases empathy
- empathy increases connection
- and connection increases conversions.
Storytelling
As human beings, we're wired to tell and consume stories. That's been the case since the dawn of time.
Want to get scientific about it? There you go - we remember stories 22 times more than we remember hard-core facts (try to remember this one, though!).
Your subscribers are way more likely to know, like and trust your brand after they read a good, valuable story from you.
... And trust is the #1 currency we're dealing with here. Without it, your subscriber won't invest in your solution.
Consent
An inseparable part of winning and regaining your subscribers' trust.
It's something to apply in your email marketing from the moment you welcome a new subscriber into your list and all throughout their customer journey.
In a (soon to be) cookieless world, it's your responsibility to collect zero-party data from your subscribers with their explicit consent. That's the only way you can send them highly relevant, highly
Plus, consent is hella sexy!
So what does it actually look like in the wild?
Your subscribers are smart.
They've had a few trips around the sun and have been exposed to thousands of marketing tactics in their inboxes.
They know what to expect from "regular" senders.
But you're not a regular sender. Your brand has a high commitment to change and impact.
Which means that your communication as a whole, and specifically email marketing, must reflect that rather than fall into the same "best practices" that aren't necessarily best for your brand or audienc
(Trust is the #1 currency you have to earn before earning anything else)
Here are some of those "best practices":
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A "limited-time offer" that magically reappears a few weeks later.
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"Surprise! We've extended the sale for you" - who are we kidding?
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Buying/renting email lists, and making it impossible to unsubscribe from them (yes, despite the Google/Yahoo regulations!)
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Email subject lines that trick subscribers into opening them - the "re:" or "fwd:" tactic is a common one.
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Flashing a bigger discount toward the end of a sales campaign, right after some of your subscribers buy from you at a smaller discount.
Can you blame your subscribers for being suspicious of email marketing, even with your best intentions?
You've already developed such a unique solution to change your customers' lives (and our planet!) for the better.
Now you simply need to get to know your subscribers deeply and get into bed with them (with consent, obvs!).
And how do you do that?
With my F.A.N. Framework:
- Fun
- Activity-based segmentation
- Networking with your audience
Thanks to this framework, my clients enjoy seeing email stats that any benchmark report can only dream of:
- Open rates north of 40%, consistently
- Click rates that are 2x-4x their industry average
- Actual replies and feedback from their subscribers
- And of course, more sales attributed directly to email.
Trying to achieve the same with your email marketing?