I had an interesting discussion this week about when you choose to make an email operational or not.
For those unfamiliar, when you make an email 'operational', you are forcing the email to send and ignore any and all rules. So this means that if the person got an email from you an hour ago and your settings don't allow another send for x amount of time, this overrides it and they get the email anyways.
Back to my discussion.
We were looking at segments to send a webinar invitation to and our list was really small. The database is over 100K records, yet we were coming up with <10K 'available to send'. Not exactly ideal.
So I asked 'if someone subscribes to email alerts about webinars and events, should the email be forced to this group as operational regardless of how many other emails they have received.'
The response was a resounding NO.
But should it be a no? If I consent - meaning I want this stuff - to you sharing information about webinars and events, don't I want to get that information? So why would you not send it to me when you have it?
Am I going to know I didn't get invited to a webinar even though I told the company I wanted to know about these opportunities? Maybe. Maybe not.
The point really is that if we are going out of our way to ask our audience what they really want to know about, segmenting that information in our system and developing a process to respect that request, why would there by any question about whether or not to send it to them?
My vote is to ignore communication limits and force the send on emails like this. Where you have an invite to a webinar and people who have raised their hands to say they want invites to webinars.
TIP: Many companies give the option to Unsubscribe which is an easy out for your audience. By giving options of what they can opt-in and opt-out of, gives you more opportunity to keep communicating with them in one way or another. But if you do this - it's up to you to make sure their requests are not mishandled.
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