Permission-based Email Marketing
In short: Permission-based email marketing means emailing only people who have chosen to hear from you. It keeps your open and click rates high, your bounces and spam complaints low, and your domain reputation strong. Collect consent through sign-up forms, never use purchased or scraped lists, and always give contacts an easy way to unsubscribe.
Permission-based email marketing is the process of ensuring that your contacts actually wish to be on your mailing list and receive your emails. With permission-based email marketing, you can be sure that your mailing lists only contain contacts who have chosen to receive your email newsletters.
Benefits
Good open and click rates
People who haven't consented to be on your mailing list may not be interested in your email campaigns. When you send them emails, they'll mark them as spam, which will damage your domain reputation. Open and click rates of emails depend entirely on how interested the email recipients are. For better contact engagement and response, send emails only to opt-in contacts.
Prevents deliverability issues
When you have a hygienic list with contacts who have opted in, it is less likely to contain non-existent email addresses. This prevents email deliverability issues such as bounces, spam complaints, unsubscribes, and spam traps.
Good domain reputation and email deliverability
Spam filters observe your contacts' responses to every campaign and maintain a reputation score for your domain. A hygienic list with proper consent options makes your emails less likely to be marked as spam. This results in a good domain reputation with spam filters and good email delivery performance. Google asks senders to keep their spam rate below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%, and Yahoo recommends staying below 0.3% as well. Sending only to contacts who asked for your emails is the most reliable way to stay under those limits.
Getting consent through Zoho Campaigns
You can easily build your mailing list using sign-up forms. You can choose a form from the sign-up form tools and place it on your website or share it on social media. Learn how to choose sign-up forms. To confirm that each address belongs to the person who signed up, you can also use double opt-in; see double opt-in vs. single opt-in.
Contacts who have not responded to your emails for the last 6 months should be segmented out and sent re-engagement emails. Retain only those who confirm that they are interested. To learn how to segment unresponsive contacts, see Segments.
Get the consent of contacts you have not communicated with in the last 6 months using our Consent feature before sending them any emails. To learn about managing consent, see Get consent from contacts.
People you shouldn't send emails to
Zoho Campaigns does not permit using purchased email addresses from any source. Purchased lists are not permission-based and can cause legal issues in many countries, and could result in serious legal penalties. If Zoho Campaigns learns that an account is using purchased email addresses, the account will be blocked. To learn more, see why you should never purchase mailing lists.
Using collected lists from internet and extracting email addresses from web scraping are illegal and against Zoho's anti-spam policy.
If Zoho Campaigns team discovers the use of purchased, collected, or harvested email addresses, we will immediately block the account. Growing your list organically is the best way to keep it hygienic and to reap more business returns.
People you can send emails to
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People who have subscribed to your email newsletter by filling out a form on your website.
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People who submitted their email address when downloading files from your website or ordering a product or service from you.
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People who gave their email addresses when they participated in a contest, event, or survey conducted by you, provided that you informed them you would be using the address to send marketing emails.
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People who checked an opt-in checkbox indicating their willingness to be contacted by you through email, provided the checkbox is unchecked by default and you have informed them that the nature of the emails will be commercial.
The best time to send emails
The time your emails reach your contacts' inboxes plays an important role in contact engagement. You can schedule your emails based on time zones and optimal open time for your contacts. This helps maintain your contacts' interest. To learn how to schedule your emails, see Send and schedule email campaigns.
Bombarding your contacts' inboxes with emails will irritate them. Setting your email frequency can help you avoid this. To learn how to limit how often each contact is emailed, see Frequency capping.
Opting out
Permission-based email marketing includes not only the part in which you get consent before adding contacts to your list, but also in providing them the option to unsubscribe at any time. Keep the unsubscribe option clear and in an easily accessible position in all your emails. Gmail and Yahoo also require senders of 5,000 or more emails a day to support one-click unsubscribe, as defined in RFC 8058, on promotional emails and to process opt-outs within 2 days, so confirm that your campaigns honor it.
A hygienic list is a strong foundation for your email marketing. The stronger your list is regarding consent, the better your email deliverability will be.