The blurring line between business and marketing emails are often overlooked and it will cost you a fortune by giving bad returns in your email marketing campaigns. And worse getting your corporate business email domain getting blacklisted!
To begin with, we will understand the difference between business and marketing emails. Then we delve deeper on the reasons why you need to separate them, and the how of it.
What are Business emails?
Business emails aka corporate emails – are the ones that your employees use right from the CEO to the front-line executives to communicate with specific individuals – within or outside of the organization. The actual receipt of these messages by recipients' is crucial because they are time sensitive, and of critical business information.
It plays a significant role as a safe channel to communicate with customers, sponsors, suppliers, and partners. In simple terms, the business emails are a lifeline of business operations.
What are Marketing emails, btw?
“Hey, check out this offer”, “don’t forget about us” you might have received these kinds of mails from Zomato, Amazon about their ongoing offers that try to get you interested. These are marketing emails.
Marketing emails pitch new products, services, or sales offers to potential customers. Marketing emails are sometimes referred to as commercial emails, since the purpose is focused on offerings or sales, and it is mostly sent in as bulk or mass email.
Mass emails sent to many recipients at once are identified as marketing emails by the regulators and spam filters. Among the different types of marketing emails are company newsletters, blog update notifications, promotions and ads, status notices, etc.
Why do you need to separate?
Successful email marketing plan includes building your brand reputation in the eyes of your current and would-be customers.
Separating your business and marketing emails can help ensure they are reliable and delivered well.
Benefits of Email separation – 5 main reasons.
1. Getting into Inbox
Priority should be given to the deliverability of the emails.
You could increase the deliverability of emails by separating the emails by type.
When you separate your business mails from your marketing emails your email service providers get a better understanding of your sending practices. Using the same servers or email addresses for these two types of emails might send a warning signal to your email service provider that you are sending bulk emails using business email.
Separating can ensure that your business mails doesn’t trigger the spam filters and reduces the risk of missing the inbox.
2. Avoiding the radar of regulations
The larger your mass marketing mailing list is, the more people are on it who do not really want your email. So, it is better to not to send too many irrelevant emails to these guys and always have opt-out option which is a good email marketing practice and to abide the regional regulatory acts such as CAN-SPAM (for USA), GDPR (for Europe), ITA (for India), Pipeda (for Canada).
Lesser the number of people annoyed by your mass-emails, lesser the chances of you getting marked as spam by these angry people. Receiving many spam complaints can cause email servers to start blocking your emails. And in worse conditions levy hefty fines to your business. So, it is better to abide the existing regulations and actively mailing only the prospects who opt-in.
By separating mass-marketing emails – you can ensure the best practices are abided to by your marketing department, and also cardon of your business /corporate emails from unnecessary hassles.
3. Try not to get blacklisted
What comes hand in hand with bulk marketing email campaigns is – your email server may get blacklisted. The blacklisting happens due to the following reasons,
· if your mailing list has lot of invalid email addresses
· if your email content is frequently flagged as spam-like.
By keeping both marketing and business mails in the same server, you run the risk of getting your business/ corporate emails blacklisted too.
What do you need to do? Try using separate servers for business and marketing mails. See it’s that easy!
4. Better organization
When you separate your business and marketing emails it is easier for you, (a) to track and record of the email marketing campaigns you have launched, (b) to have defined rules, backup procedures for your corporate email. It is a win: win for both sides.
You can easily organize the data about the mails like open rates, click rates and unsubscribe rates, so that you can easily get the idea of which part of your email campaign is working and which is not working. It will be easier to optimize them and follow the best practices deemed fit for the two types.
5. Helps in building a reputation
Business or corporate emails contain relevant and critical business information to the intended recipient. They must be handled with care while delivering. If they do not reach the recipient in time or land in the spam folder – it doesn’t go down well with your stakeholders.
Marketing emails need to quickly engage with potential clients. It needs to go in front of them, excite them to open the email, and woo them to act. They need to feel safe to open the communication from an unknown brand, and it must be relevant to them. More relevant emails translate into better value for the audience, which translates to more value for your business.
It is obvious that these 2 are from Mars and Venus. Both are needed for an organization – but have different rules, different reasons to gain reputation, and different in their very nature.
But how?
Ok we discussed about the importance of separating the emails. Now the next question is how you do it?
· Using a different domain name for the business and marketing mails is the simpler way. Though it can go to the same person and same inbox, but having different domains allows blocks on your marketing domain to not affect your business domain.
· Using different email servers is another recommended email marketing practice. Sending your marketing email messages through email servers separate from your business email so that you can follow the email marketing best practices to maintain reputation.
In conclusion your emails reflect your brand value segregating both marketing and business mails helps in maintaining professionalism.
And it helps in drafting a winning email marketing strategy.