Email Marketing: Building Trust by Giving Respect

Respecting your current and potential subscribers is important in building trust through your email marketing campaign. The level of respect you give will be evident in how you collect email addresses and what you do with them. Keep in mind that, for most individuals, an email address is private and is shared with email marketers with a certain level of trust. When an email address is shared with you by an individual, what you do with it greatly affects whether you get to build on that trust or ruin it entirely. Keep in mind that individuals trust those that show the most respect for their privacy. Listed below are tips to help you give the highest level of respect to your current and potential subscriber base.

1. Set High Permission Standards
 
Never try to trick people into opting in for certain things. You need to get clear permission to send out everything you want to through your email marketing campaign. This means that you should never pre-check opt-in tick boxes or trick subscribers with intentionally misleading text (i.e. "Do not select this option if you do not want to receive..."). Before people sign up, you should also provide clear information on what exactly they are signing up for. Let them know what type of emails they will be receiving and how often they should expect them. Lastly, require all new subscribers to confirm their decision to opt in through a second action. This could be done by instructing them to click on a confirmation link located in your first email.
 
2. Be Transparent About Your Privacy Policies
 
Many email marketers intentionally publish privacy policies in long legal speak knowing that subscribers are unlikely to read them. Others publish them in small print to make it difficult to find. To show the level of respect you give to your subscribers, you need to make it simple for them to discover and understand what exactly you intend to use their data for. This means writing your privacy policies in simple language and making it easily accessible. If you trust and respect their privacy and if you really are trustworthy, you shouldn't have anything to hide.
 
3. Respect Permission to the Highest Degree
 
People set certain expectations when they submit their email addresses to trustworthy email marketers. They certainly don't expect receiving marketing messages from new senders or other things they did not explicitly sign up for. This means that you should never rent your list out to third parties even if you feel their emails won't be traced back to you. You shouldn't even try to use your list to promote other parts of your business. Give your subscribers exactly what you told them to expect and they will recognize you as trustworthy.
 
In email marketing, you need to show subscribers exactly why they should trust you; and a huge part of your trustworthiness lies in the amount of respect you give to their privacy. Never try to trick them into opting in for anything they don't expect or fully understand and value the trust they show for you as they give you their email addresses.

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