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How not to turn a newsletter into spam

Email marketing is a promotion tool that helps business and audience communicate. Mailings are often confused with spam and not used in work. We decided to remind why this is not worth doing.



This material includes the basic tools of email marketing, as well as methods for their effective use. In order to determine why in your case the newsletter turned into spam, you need to carefully study each stage of the launch of the conversation.

What is email marketing?


This is a way to communicate with users. Email marketing strengthens and enhances loyalty to a business or project, which means it helps to increase sales. Our newsletter agency brings IT and blockchain projects from 7 to 15% of the profit.

What is the difference between spam emails


Speaking in the “official” language, spam is a newsletter to which the user did not consent. Today, the concept has changed a bit. Now spam is also something that the user does not like.

Suppose you have an investment company. You inform your clients about various activities, share news, but some of them have long lost interest in the field itself, and specifically in you. What does the user do when he receives your letter? In the best case, it will unsubscribe, in the worst, it will click the spam button. In time to clean the database of inactive people (and add them only after Double Opt In) is the best way to avoid this.



Sometimes the user cannot find the unsubscribe button from the newsletter, as some marketers are “afraid” to put them. This is the wrong decision. Again, if the user does not want to receive newsletters from you, but can not unsubscribe, he will add an email to spam.

Good email promotes additional sales


Online stores, courses, and others use mailing lists more actively than others. This is due to the fact that such a business "lives" on additional sales: email marketing allows you to provoke the user to re-purchase and not to forget that "there was such a good store." After all, email marketing is a way to communicate with the user. And if there is no communication, then the client will forget about you and go to another seller.

5 key benefits of email marketing


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  5. “Transparency" and the speed of obtaining results that give room for improvement.

According to the results of the mailing (Open Rate, Click Rate, user selection of a particular offer (if there are several), goal achievement, the same unsubscribe), you can easily understand what exactly went wrong or worked well.

Rules for Creating Quality Newsletter Content


There are pretty banal conditions for good content: the lack of “water” in the text, nice design and brevity. But it’s difficult to talk about some correct option, because it is communication with the audience that makes it clear what they need: abstract letters with brief information or long reads.

Also with the design: you can sit for hours on the template, come up with interesting solutions, and text on a white background will be effective. In other words, CA dictates the text and design of the email newsletter.

Initially, it is worth striving for minimalism and conciseness: most users are lazy, they do not want to delve into the text for a long time.

The newsletter must be made recognizable to the user. He should understand who she came from just by looking at the letter. Email marketing is a dialogue and with your actions you form the level of user trust.

The letter itself should be “easy” both for perception and for downloading (not everyone has good internet or fast devices). Well and, of course, the most informative and useful for the user.

Do not forget in the letters about Call to action. But keep in mind: the more choices a user receives, the greater the chance that he will eventually become uninterested in the offer.

Examples include letters from Dasha from Aviasales. I do not use the service, but I always read their newsletter. Her approach is an example of how to communicate with the user. It is always interesting and funny. And most importantly - she never goes too far and does not load unnecessary information.



Aviasales Newsletter Examples

The mailing planning strategy can be divided into 3 stages:


  1. Analysis of the project and determination of the goal (what exactly do we expect from email – marketing).
  2. Studying the audience.
  3. Study of competitors: it is necessary to “trace” their strategy in order to do better.

Performance Analytics


Determine what worked efficiently and what is not very possible with the help of Open Rate, Click Rate metrics, unsubscribe, complaints about spam and conversion.


Sendpulse Metric Screenshot

What is the “dead weight” in the newsletters and how to work with it


“Dead weight” is a low Open Rate newsletter, after which users massively unsubscribed or didn’t follow the links at all (when your goal was to get them to the site, for example). This also includes the low% of email deliverability, as well as the high Bounce rate.

Such people need a different approach to work - they need to be “revived". Often this happens thanks to pleasant and individual offers (discounts, additional bonuses, etc. that can stimulate them to return to us). You can’t throw them away right away, but you can’t expect that these people will come back. It is necessary to make several gradual attempts to “awaken” them, but to do this constantly and persistently is a mistake.

A vivid bad example is one well-known online clothing delivery store. They constantly send out mailings, even if you do not open them. And if you open and unsubscribe, they continue to send news anyway. What is funny, the proposal does not change - what is given in the main letter, then in the reactivation one. Is it effective?

Base collection methods:

  • Site subscription form.
  • Holding contests, the conditions of which include adding your contacts.
  • Landing pages with useful and interesting content.
  • Pop-up
  • Providing access to tools.
  • Online / offline events that offer subscription bonuses.


An example of free distribution of a paid rate “for abandoned mail”.

In this case, you need to segment the subscriber base by the presence of “input” data. That is, what we know about users: language segment, perfect / imperfect action (donat / purchase / purpose of subscription), position in the sales funnel, pages visited, presence / absence of additional information (gender / name / possibly, presence of children (for certain proposals and goals), and after that - their behavior in the newsletters.

After you collect the database, do not rush to send letters to it before the testing phase


First of all, test the headers, so you know what people are “responding to”. Already after - the content of the letter.

The best way is A / B testing with 3 options. My opinion is this: you always do what you like. Therefore, you need to select 2 options that you think are best, but add another 1 to the test, which, in your opinion, will work the worst. Perhaps this option will be most interesting to subscribers.

Most Popular Email Marketer Mistakes


  • Do not draw conclusions from your mistakes. Everyone is wrong, but mistakes are the best lesson. Working with an outdated database is not a mistake, the main thing is to “abandon” it in time: it makes no sense for a long time to try to reanimate the user.
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  • Do not send unreadable letters (in solid text without separators) - it is very bad, because it is difficult for the user to read. Therefore, it is better to use banal lists / paragraphs / bold. Well and one more “sin” - refusal of analytics.

Favorable time for mailing


Naturally, there is the most effective time for mailing. As a rule, this is the morning of the working day (Monday), when the user comes to work or wakes up, prepares coffee for himself and opens the mail. But the best mailing time is the time you figured out by tests. In extreme cases, there are wonderful tools that analyze the opening time and do re-sending at a “good” time for a particular user.



And finally, 5 resources that will help improve the quality of letters for clients


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  5. , , - (, spamtester.bazaaremail.com/).

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