
Ask HN: Email Marketing – Doing It the Right Way - tzury
Hi all,<p>Can you describe the do&#x27;s and don&#x27;ts regarding this?<p>We want to start using this method, based on legit lists such as acquired from Dun &amp; Bradstreet and the likes.<p>What measures should we take at our end to protect domain from being blacklisted? Assuming we plan to act by the book by all means and fairness.
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legitster
Email Marketer here: I really wouldn't use acquired lists, even "legitimate"
ones. Assuming they are not full of spam traps or bad data, email is the worst
medium to come in cold on. Once someone unsubscribes or blacklists, they are
gone forever.

Also, the way email clients work now is much more robust. Even if your emails
are not marked as 'spam', the big players (Outlook, Gmail, etc) use machine
learning to determine if people are actually reading your emails. Badly
performing senders are relegated to a Clutter or Promo folder, which can be
just as bad as Spam. So coming in strong with good performing emails is very
important to establishing a reputation. (Double opt-in is your friend here,
that opt-in email gets a lot of inbox activity for you.)

If you have a list, use that to manually call down or email people
individually. If you are going to intrude on them cold, at least do them the
honor of being personal with it. Plus, you can really hone down on the
messaging and finding what people respond to. This is very much a case where
premature optimization is your enemy.

Start looking for an automation platform once you have more transactional
emails established. Have all the opt-ins and follow best-practices, yadda
yadda.

~~~
tzury
Thank you very much for this informative answer.

~~~
legitster
As an idea, if you have an existing list of emails from former customers or
lost opportunities, those are a good candidate for a long term nurture
campaign. If there were reasons they looked at your product in the past, there
are good odds they may look at it in the future again. Keep them on a
quarterly or monthly drip and remind them of new features or platform updates.

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zzo38computer
You should need the user to opt in (although if they opted in to third-party
marketing from Dun & Bradstreet then presumably that is legitimate too), and
then send them the messages, that do not contain any lies, and do not send
third-party marketing from your domain (unless they opted in to third-party
marketing too), and then hopefully will not be black listed. Even if they are,
some users will black list stuff they do not want using various methods (I set
up a different email alias for each thing and delete the aliases that start
receiving messages that I do not want).

