You’ve got a subscriber list that you’ve gathered over time. Perhaps this is a list you built up over years of attending conferences or clients giving you their email addresses in-store, but now you have no record of them opting in to receive emails from you. With POPIA looming there is an ever-growing concern amongst businesses that want to start email marketing but aren’t really sure what opted in lists look like.

We’ll take you through the do’s and don’ts so you can rest assured that you’ve received the proper consent to email your subscribers.

Mail Blaze requirements:

Mail Blaze’s email marketing service terms and conditions require that all our clients only email subscribers that have opted in to receive email marketing emails from you. We do this to ensure stable delivery rates for our clients and to ensure we don’t receive massive amounts of spam complaints.

What to do if you have a list that isn’t opted in

What qualifies as non-opted in lists

First, let’s discuss what we consider non-opted in:

• Email addresses you haven’t emailed within a year
• Email addresses that did not expressly give consent through a process of opting in to a newsletter
• Bought email lists
• Rented email subscription lists

Steps to get your list opted in

Step 1: Set up a subscription flow on Mail Blaze.

You can do this by crafting your subscription workflow under your List settings. You can find more information about everything that is included in the below two articles:

Creating Your List - refer to the section FORMS AND EMAILS How to Streamline your subscription workflow in Mail Blaze

Step 2: Contact your list

Please note: You will need to use your own email client to send every person on your list an email to ask them to subscribe.

Things to keep in mind when you are emailing this list:

• Notify your contacts about your intent to subscribe them to your newsletter.
• If you still know where you gathered their information, you should add this information into your mail.
• Direct these contacts to your newly created subscription form to allow them to op in. This will ensure that these subscribers will automatically be added into your Mail Blaze list with confirmation that they have opted in.
• If you have a promotion or incentive that could encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter, include it in your email. This could be something like a discount code, voucher, free delivery or even just a valuable piece of content.
• Be careful with your incentive - you don’t want to come across as spammy.
• Do not send an email notifying them that they are subscribed to your list - you cannot assume consent.
• Do not email these contacts again if they did not subscribe after receiving this email - if they do not subscribe after a week, discard their information.

Step 3: You will now have your opted in list

You might feel discouraged that you have a vastly smaller list than when you initially started but don’t be. Emailing to a list that didn’t want to receive communication from you can impact your email performance drastically. It is always better to email people who are genuinely interested in your products or services rather than those who are not.

Step 4: Start creating and sending campaigns

Now that you have an opted in list you can now create email campaigns to engage with your subscribers. You can also start promoting your newsletter to ensure that you start growing your list.

• Be sure you do the following with your campaigns:
• Add value to your subscribers through your content and offers.
• Make sure you are sending on a consistent basis.
• Don’t forget to set up a template for your campaigns. Templates help you establish consistency and recognition.
• Make sure that you measure your campaign performance so you can optimise your campaigns and get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

If you’d like some advice on how you can start your email marketing journey. Reach out to our team via email [email protected] or hop onto our chat line to find out more.