Ethical Retention Marketing: Balancing Tactics with Customer Respect - EP 16

When you take the stance of being an ethical marketer, you're taking a mid to long-term approach. Don't push people too far because you don't know which crazy person you're gonna push to their end, and it's gonna really be costly for you in more ways than one.

Letting subscribers choose frequency and the content types. You know, people don't go to preference centers always just to unsubscribe. Oftentimes they go because they wanna say, I want to receive less emails, right? But having a quality preference center, I think is key as we are looking to 2025 and beyond. Yo, Chase, what's good, dude? How you doing?

Doing well, thanks, man. How are you?

Good, man. I had a rough weekend this weekend.

Why is that?

Well, man, TikTok was down for like four hours or eight hours, and man, I didn't know what to do with myself.

Oh man, that's so funny. I actually saw this funny, this funny post, I think on Threads or something about like this girl posted. Oh man, TikTok was down. I actually had to socialize with my sub, my husband. Turns out he's actually a nice guy.

I love it. I love the creative juices. But we're back now. Everyone's back, and it looks like everything's working.

So.

So back to no more boredom, I guess. Have something to do at all times. I don't know what we did before TikTok, man.

Yeah, it's funny. I don't actually ever use it. I know you use it and a lot of people use it. There was one other funny post I saw that TikTok faked their own death to see who showed up for their funeral. That was like a really funny one too.

It was also one of the greatest marketing hacks. If this was a marketing trick, whatever it was, man, it was really powerful and everyone talked about it. So it's—

It worked.

It's an interesting thing. But anyways, you ready to shoot this thing?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, in three, two, one.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What is up, everyone? Welcome to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing in e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim, and I'm here with my co-host, Chase Diamond. Yo, Chase. All right, episode 16. The title is Ethical Retention Marketing: Balancing Aggressive Tactics with Customers' Respect. TL;DR, we're going to tell you all the stupid things you shouldn't be doing and the things that you should be thinking about as you go. And we'll give you real reasons why and data and information, laws as well too, because there's things that are happening in this market that unfortunately are illegal that people are doing. The last thing we want you to do is get in trouble. And so our goal here is to talk about ethical retention marketing and what it really is and all that good stuff. But Chase, let's start off, man. Like if I were to tell you what is ethical marketing or ethical retention marketing, how would you design it, man?

Yeah, for me it's like ethical retention marketing is essentially, you know, strategies that are supposed to build long-term relationships with customers rather than focusing on like short-term wins, right? I think a lot of people focus on, short-term opportunities and ignore mid to long-term opportunities. And ultimately they end up shooting themselves in the foot. Right. So with this, right, like we're going to focus on emphasizing really transparency, respect, and that fun word called compliance. Right. If we are compliant, maybe it's quote unquote vanilla, but we are going to be safe in the long run. So really with this, right, having good ethics isn't only good for our business, but it's also good for building trust with customers and subscribers. Which ultimately is going to lead to the goals of retention that we want of higher LTVs.

Yeah, the worst thing you can do is burn a list out or trick a list until they no longer trust you. I think we've seen this story quite often. In fact, when I think about it, I think about 2 things here. I think number one, it's like transparency versus manipulation. I'm talking about things like honest subject lines, clear disclaimers, real sender lists, and then really the avoiding of the trickery and the false or misleading information. That is one area of it. And then the second side of it is when you think about why ethics really matter for retention? Well, one, it's really brand reputation. You know, you kind of nailed it. Like, if you're going to have a long lifetime value, the reality is you can't have bad brand reputation. And in fact, to build a loyal customer base, you can't do that with the risk of losing trust through shady practices ultimately.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And the truth is, when we do talk about retention marketing, we often focus on ROI, conversions, and numbers. And A load of other metrics, right? But however, if we don't include and if we completely ignore ethics in that, sure, the metrics might look great. Again, that could be a temporary thing, but long term it could really backfire really in a big way. So if we are ethical and compliant, we don't always have to be looking over our shoulders of like, is someone coming after us? Are people going to mistrust us? We can kind of cruise Straight ahead and forward and, and just know that we are doing things quote unquote the right way.

Yeah, and you nailed it exactly correct. I mean, when you think about it, it's about short-term gain often is why people do the things we do, and I've seen that way too often. In fact, let's, let's talk about that. Let's talk about balancing that aggressive tactic with customer respect. So let's dive right into it. Look, we all want to see results, and Chase, you know, the question that I have, and I think we can go back and forth as we think about the things that we talk about here, but how do you strike the balance between going after a sale aggressively and staying respectful to your subscribers at the same time? So let's go back and forth. I think we got a couple points we can talk about here.

Yeah, for sure. So the first one that comes to mind is the whole frequency of email, and let's talk about SMS as well, right? So sending kind of extremely frequent emails and/or text messages can be effective, right? Like we talk about it, send more emails, send more text messages. Make more money. However, it is going to lead to burnout and/or fatigue if it's overdone and there's no overarching strategy. So you do want to, you know, you do want to respect kind of subscribers' unsubscribe requests and don't trick people into staying, right? Don't force them to stay. Don't make the opt-out really challenging or impossible. That actually is going to hurt you. People are going to be upset. They're going to be frustrated. They're going to probably blast you on social. They're going to mark you as spam, right? So As a best practice, segment your list by engagement levels and respect people's wishes. And it's pretty easy to see based on kind of the marked as spams and the unsubscribes, if those are coming in kind of in the plethora and more than normal and you're kind of increasing your send volume and frequency, you know, it's pretty clear that you need to kind of pull it back a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, send more email. When I say that is not literally sending more email all the time to the same people with the same message, it's really you know, personalization and getting— driving down to segments and really creating curated messages for different people. So I'm 100% with you. In fact, the second balance rule I think that you can think about is personalization versus intrusiveness. So I'm talking about like, okay, we now have more personal data than ever on customers, their usage, their behaviors. And it's important you can stay relevant, but you can't go too creepy. I think that there's a balance of that. Like, I get it. Like when someone leaves a browse abandonment, you can get in front of them and say, hey, we saw saw you browsing our site, but it can start coming off a little bit borderline creepy if you're not there to actually help them out, but to just be like, hey, it's a browse abandonment, like we saw you come back. Like sometimes people don't like that. So finding that relevance behind it, and that also comes into like privacy concerns. You know, the reason why, you know, you look at emails and people are willing to give more emails than SMS these days because email, people are kind of looking at it as this like blanket, like safe anonymous area where you've got an email, it's not flooding you, but an SMS is really personal. So when you think about that intrusiveness starts to happen because you're hitting them too often or too much, but also with messaging that is so irrelevant that people feel like they're not really getting value behind it. In fact, that's probably your third one, right? What's your third one you got?

Yeah, and real quick, I want to say be personal as like if you're our friend or a family member or someone close. Don't be a stalker, right? I think that's like where you draw the line is be personal, be close, be friendly, but don't be a stalker, right? Don't do a bunch of weird things that like you probably shouldn't be privy to and that you probably shouldn't, you know, you draw the line and just make sure that it's personal, kind of in a friendship-friendly way, not like creeper stalky, kind of like people feel sometimes about Meta listening to conversations or, you know, your Alexa kind of from Amazon. So that was— I just want to mention that. But the next one that kind of you were alluding to is value-driven content. And with this, right, like it's pretty simple, but like make sure you're actually delivering value. A lot of people think that they're delivering value, But there really aren't, right? There's nothing in it for the subscriber on the other side or the customer on the other side. So, you know, different types of value comes in different shapes and sizes. So it could be promotions, right? People obviously want some kind of discount or offer. Really lean into educational content. Can you teach someone something? Entertainment is another one. Can you make someone feel a type of way? Can you, you know, uplift them? Can you brighten their day? Can you make them laugh? And sharing like brand stories, right? So all those types of things are important. Rather than just pushing discounts. Again, discounts do matter, but they're just a part of the equation. They're not the entire equation. So when you can incorporate all the things we mentioned, you know, especially the brand storytelling and UGC and other content like that, that's going to increase your level of engagement and that's going to let people, you know, leave better reviews, send you more content, tag you on social, more content because you are showcasing it and you are utilizing it and people No, I couldn't agree more with you on that.

I think discounts are the funnel clearing or the bottom of the funnel where you've got to go build them up, build the story, build the trust, give them reasons and learnings or whatever it might be. And then when that discount comes, these people are already ready to buy. All you did was push them forward and you can only push people forward so much before you've got no one at the top. And if you think about it like that, that's often why discounts are the best part of the funnel. Brands that only go on sale sell sometimes. It's not because they only sell. Sometimes you're just doing a good job building them up and then clearing that funnel ultimately each and every time. In fact, that's where number 4 and one of my favorite ones, which is setting customer expectations. I think that brands don't do a good enough job. And marketers, this is for you guys to listen to. When you have a clear opt-in process and subscription preference, telling them when you're going to message, how often you're going to message them, how much you're going to send them and what you're going to send them. This is what people like, man. People want to have that clarity and know that's happening. In fact, this is where I've got this whole like double opt-in and confirm. It's really funny, you know, if we talked about double opt-ins maybe 5 years ago, people would panic freak. You don't want to lose leads and all that stuff. But if you start thinking about all these applications and things that you're signing up for, like if you sign up for your favorite mobile app or your social media accounts or, you know, different things nowadays, more and more tools and services are now making you go to your inbox, confirm that it's your real email before jumping in. Which means that the market is starting to shift into more of a confirmed or double opt-in process. I really do believe that this is the future ultimately. I don't know about you or your thoughts around that, but wouldn't you agree at some level?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I feel like with all too, like, bots and spam and just privacy and all these issues, right? Just getting that, you know, agreed double consent, making sure it's legitimate can save you, right? So, you know, I think if you're a good marketer, you probably can get away without it, but I think the masses probably should be using it because the chances are They don't really know necessarily, and I don't mean that negatively, but they don't really necessarily know what they're doing and they might get into issues and they might be mailing a bunch of people that are bouncing or they didn't actually opt in or are spam traps, right?

No, I get it, man. And it's about being strategic but respectful at the same time. All right. I know you're enjoying this pod, but I wanted to stop you just for 30 seconds and tell you about something very special that Chase and I have been working on. Between the two of us, we have over 20 years of experience in email marketing. And when we teamed up to do this pod, we realized we had even a bigger opportunity to put our minds together and create a certification program that takes our 20 years of knowledge and share it to the world. And that's why we created Ecom Email Certified, an end-to-end course and certification program that's designed to take anyone, regardless if you're a newbie to an experienced marketer, founder, executive, agency marketer, or any other marketing professional, to teach them everything we know about email and SMS marketing. From deliverability to AI to copywriting to design to strategy, we cover it all. It's loaded with 175+ modules, 25 hours of education combined with quizzes and community, all designed to educate, test, and certify you as a full-fledged email marketer for e-commerce. And since you're listening to this pod, we want to reward you for your loyalty. So we're going to give you a coupon for $100 off this certification. Jump over to ecom emailcertified.com. Use coupon code SENDIT. That's S-C-E-N-D-I-T, no space. Join our certification program today. Now back to your pod. All right, let's move to one of my little favorite topics. I find this really exciting because if I zap back to 2008 when I started the internet and, and started marketing online and started doing email marketing, you know, there was always this like fine line of how do I get attention? How do I stay in front of— how do I almost trick them to becoming my, you know, opening and clicking emails, right? Like, I'm not going to lie about that. I was definitely on the borderline of spamming back in 2008 because I didn't know better. Plus, people didn't know anyways. What the reality is, these have now started to become illegal over the years and they're highly questionable tactics. You know, let's call them out. Things like, you know, when people use that whole like re: which is like reply or forward in their subject lines, or when there was no prior conversation or changing sender names and all sorts of these things. These are tactics that are Technically illegal by CAN-SPAM. And if you know about CAN-SPAM, Chase, you know, every email could be up to a $10,000 fine. Not that people are getting that often, but it's out there because it's set up. And as we know about rules and laws, it may be fine. You could skirt it for years and years. It only takes that one right person to holler, scream, whatever it wants to do. So Chase, let's dive into these illegal tactics because I want to talk about them because I don't think people talk about them enough. So I'll let you kick it off.

Yeah, I'm gonna start and kind of double down that one that you just mentioned. So that's kind of under what's called misleading subject lines. So using the re or the forward suggests ongoing communication where there isn't one, right? So if you're in a thread with someone and you're using that and there's been conversation, like, and you hit reply, like that obviously automatically happens. But if you're using it outta context where there really is no thread and there wasn't ongoing comms, that is bad. Don't do that. Don't trick people. Um, everyone has kind of caught up to it now and it just, it doesn't look good. As you mentioned, right, CAN-SPAM explicitly prohibits people doing kind of deceptive headers and subject lines, which that falls under. So that's a big one.

Yeah.

I'd say the second one is changing kind of sender names illegally. So when you send an email, right, like you have the subject line, the preview text, and then the other part of it is the from name. So if I send it from me, it'd be Chase Diamond. If Jimmy sent from him, it'd be Jimmy Kim. You know, for our newsletter, It would be ecom email marketer, right? So with that, you know, if you try changing that to something that it's not, and, you know, not to call them out, but like, I remember Chubbies used to be really entertaining and engaging where they would always change it. Like, you know, your friend, or they would just change it all the time. And I thought it was kind of clever until I learned that it wasn't legal. And obviously things have changed. Maybe when they were doing it a while back, it was legal, but you have to identify your business or your brand name accurately. You know, posing as someone else or using fake email addresses is a really quick way to get into trouble. So don't do that.

Yeah, that's, that's been around for years and it's technically very illegal and people still do it. I mean, in SMS, people are very clear to identify themselves. In email, most brands are now doing a good, good enough job. And look, it doesn't mean you can't change it up and come up with witty and fun, quirky ways to kind of change it up to make it look different. But you can't be so far away that you're not identifying yourself accurately. And that's what it really comes into. All right, I got a third one for you is the hidden or incomplete unsubscribe link. Have you ever seen where like people press enter like 1,000 times and push it down to the bottom of the email, right? Like trying to hide it. Look, unsubscribes are there for a reason. It's so you can A, filter people who don't want your email anymore because they may be out of their buying cycle, or B, because what's that called again? A missend or whatever it is. Yeah. Ultimately you want unsubscribes to happen and they need to be visible, functional, and they must be honored. Now here's the rule. 10 days. That's the CAN-SPAM rule. You have 10 business days and, you know, all the major ESPs will honor it right away, but you have 10 days. And the worst thing you can do is either ignore, delay, or go throw it over into another ESP and send to them from another name because you're trying to trick a person. So don't do that. That's a really bad one that I've seen happen. And the other one that I've seen, and this is obviously one that people should know, but you'd be shocked how many people talk to me about, but harvested or purchased lists. Look, It's not in the USA, and I'm going to be really clear about this so people understand this. In the USA, we live in an opt-out state. And what that means is essentially you can email anybody you want ultimately, as long as you're giving them a clear unsubscribe. However, we're all e-commerce marketers and the last thing you want to do is jeopardize your deliverability. You want to jeopardize problems behind it. So spam traps, sender reputation, all of these are at risk when you're sending to these purchase or harvest lists. Ultimately, it's never a safe thing to do. Yeah. Yes, you can do it. You can consider it. But the reality of it is it is putting yourself at risk each and every time. So I get worried about this. I always tell people, if you're purchasing lists, even when you're thinking about third-party identity tools, I love them. They're important. There's great filters and education around how to leverage and maximize it, but they aren't subscribed to your list, honestly, at the end of the day. And if they're not really subscribed to your list and they don't want it, the last thing you want is them to report you to Spamhaus or SpamCop or any of these places and get yourself in trouble all over a single email address. And people that are probably not going to buy your product that easily anyway. So there's that one. Chase, you got one more at all?

Yeah. One final one I have is kind of penalties and enforcement. So, you know, with everything we're talking about and other things obviously that we didn't have a chance to mention, you know, the fines can be substantial for CAN-SPAM. I think, Jimmy, you mentioned $10,000 for the email stuff. Yeah. And then on the SMS side too, like the fines are very, very hefty as well. I think that's like on a— is that on a per contact or per recipient basis? It's like—

Per email sent. So it's like every email you receive that violates CAN-SPAM can cause you this. This is as simple as not putting an address on the bottom of your email. I know we see this all the time. I call it out on social all the time. Make sure you put your address in the bottom of the email, of a marketing email.

Yeah.

It's so silly, so simple, but not everyone enforces. Unfortunately, Klaviyo doesn't enforce it on their plain text emails when they should be. It's a good thing where I've seen Omnisend does a really good job doing that.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's important. You wanna make sure that obviously your platform Hold you accountable before you go out there and kind of screw yourself.

And then, yeah, I know, and I know I've seen tempt— it seems really tempting to do this thing and try these shortcuts, but in the long run, they only hurt your brand, not to mention it breaks the law.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, we've seen brands get blacklisted and it's taken them months, if not ever, right? Like, to clean up their reputation takes a very long time, right? It's the whole thing, you know, with getting canceled, cancel culture. You know, it takes 10 years to build a reputation, takes 2 seconds of the wrong tweet, the wrong post, the wrong whatever it might be, wrong video to kind of, you know, get canceled, I guess, for lack of a better word. So the same thing happens in email. Just follow best practices. Be a good person. You know, think about yourselves in your shoes. What would you want to receive? Would you want to receive unwanted emails? Would you want to be tricked in subject lines? You know, would you want to Not be able to unsubscribe, like all of these things, right? Just put yourself in the shoes and it's pretty easy to reverse engineer what you're not supposed to do and what you should do.

Yeah, no doubt about that, man. That, that statement, it only takes one bad email, one pristine spam trap that you might trip over because you got a bad lead somewhere that you picked up because you didn't do a good job doing this, or you added a lead back into your thing because you picked up some old list from somewhere you wanted to reactivate and ultimately you hit a bad spam trap. They throw you on Spamhaus, for example, and for the next 24, 48 hours or even longer, You may not be able to send. I actually had someone reach out recently. They're like, "How do I fix this?" I said, "Dude, what did you do?" And he goes, "Well, you know, I had these old leads that I kind of had, and I wanted to load them up and send them an email." And I was like, "Wasn't worth it, dude. Now you're gonna have to reverse it. You're gonna have to go show this the spam provider that you did a good job." And ultimately, I don't know if they ever figured it out, but it's a it's a big headache for very little positive result. All right, let's jump in. Let's talk best practices because. You know, we've talked about the negative here. Let's jump into best practices to maintaining compliance and building trust. So we've identified what not to do. Let's talk about those best practices and what makes it effective. So let's go through 6 here because I think we have a list here of 6 and we'll go back and forth on them together and we'll talk about each one of them. So Chase, kick it off.

Yeah. Number 1 is clear and concise email and SMS copy, right? So using subject lines that accurately describe the content. No clickbait. It is what it is. Maybe you get slightly less opens than you did— you would if you have clickbait, but you're gonna get way higher conversion rates, way higher click-throughs, and way less unsubscribes by just making your subject line and your preview text relevant to the content that you're sending. It's that easy, but some people make it that hard. And it can be your timing.

And that doesn't mean you don't have to be hypey, Chase. Like that just purely means— Yeah, yeah, of course. You, you, you just need to stay relevant. Don't go off or try, you know what the worst ones are where they're like, hey, bonus inside.

Or like, you're like, you're like, you won.

Or like, this is yours. Like so vague. What I call in the past in the marketing world, they call blind copy. Ultimately, don't be blind. If you can't explain what's in your subject line, it's probably blind. If you can't explain what's in your body of your email, it's probably blind. You need to at least tell them why and what, because all you're going to do ultimately is anger people, even though your metrics will look inflated.

100%. And then, yeah, with that too, right? Just keeping your sender name consistent with your brand. Don't change it. Don't be misleading. Just keep it simple. It is what it is.

Yeah.

Hey, it's Chase, and I hope you're enjoying the pod, but if I could just have 30 seconds of your time, I want to tell you about our special friends at Omnisend. Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS marketing platform built specifically for e-commerce brands. They make it super easy to engage your customers, drive repeat sales, and create those seamless personalized experiences that we're always talking about on this pod. And one thing that I love about Omnisend is they're trusted by over 125,000 e-commerce merchants around the world and their users absolutely love them. They have a 4.8-star rating from over 5,800 reviews on the Shopify App Store. It's an obvious choice for your email, SMS, and push needs. In fact, I'm actually in the process of moving over my own email newsletter and some of my clients, and they have been fantastic. Their support and their platform has been amazing and there's tons of features and it's been surprisingly very easy to use. And the whole migration process, I know it sounds daunting. It's actually been a breeze. It's been way easier than I could imagine and their team has really carried a lot of the weight of that migration, and they'll do the same for you as well as they have a great automation tool. They're gonna help bring over your contacts and all your other important data that you need. And they aren't raising any prices, right? They're not gonna raise prices like you, on you constantly, like some of the other ones, you know who we're talking about, and call them profile-based pricing alignment, really fancy term that no one means, but Omnisend's not gonna do that. They're gonna speak the language that we speak. They're not gonna raise prices on you constantly. So if you're looking to take your email marketing and your SMS marketing and your push to the next level, I highly recommend that you check out Omnisend. They've got the tools, the automation, and the expertise needed to help grow your brand so you can ultimately thrive. Head over to omnisend.com/sendit to learn more and start scaling your customer engagement today. And let them know that Jimmy and I sent you. Now back to the pod. It's, it's a good one.

All right. Number 2 was the easy opt-out. I'm talking about making sure your unsubscribes, or if they reply to an SMS to stop, just honor it, dude, and honor it as fast as possible. Like there's no point in keeping people around that want to get off your list. That's like someone being at your door and saying, I want to get outta your door and being like, No, no, no, just go walk around a couple more times before you leave. They want out, let 'em out. It's actually good for you to let people out of your list.

Yeah, the extreme version is don't, don't hold the people, AKA the subscribers hostage, right?

Yeah. That's bad.

The next one is list hygiene. So again, here's the name of the game is quality over quantity. Quantity is a vanity metric. Sure, it's great if you have a lot of people that are all highly engaged. However, If you can choose one or the other, it's quality over quantity. So removing people that are unengaged subscribers to really ensure that your open rates and kind of your engagements stay healthy. And ultimately you wanna respect your subscribers' inboxes. You know, if they are receiving emails and they're not engaging and opening, you know, they frankly probably just don't want what you got. So we talk a lot about this, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot in kind of our certification program that Yeah, no, 100%.

In fact, when I go to number 4 is preference centers. This is something I think is becoming more and more important in e-commerce and you should be thinking about it, but letting subscribers choose frequency and the content types. I'm sure you've seen it. It was only available for the largest companies at one point, but we've seen it more and more available from different ESPs. We've got companies like Digio that offer a very much a focused one that you can go build and customize. But the reality is this, right? People don't go to preference centers always just to unsubscribe. Oftentimes they go because they want to say, I want to receive less emails or I don't want to receive the promotional, I still want product updates, for example. So not only can you help it build trust and reduce your unsubscribe, but having a quality preference center, I think, is key as we look into 2025 and beyond.

Dude, 100% agree. Save the unsub, give people more relevant content, less unwanted emails of certain things they don't want. Everyone wins.

Yeah.

So the next one is segmenting and personalization done right. So only use data customers and consumers and subscribers have willingly provided. Again, this is the line of being personal and friendly, but don't be a stalker and really making sure that you are aligning the offer and content with their interests. You know, it's— they're going to tell you Directly and indirectly what they are interested in and just serve them things that are relevant but not creepy.

100%, man. And, and the last one here is near and dear to my heart. And if you're not following Chase and I on social media as you're listening to this, you absolutely should be because we talk about this. But regular legal check-ins, stay up to date. CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CCPA. If none of those don't mean anything to you today or you don't really understand them, you need to go read up on them because each one has different laws. And again, And again, I know you might think I'm a small brand, I'm, you know, or I'm a big brand, or I'm not going to get caught because I'm not relevant enough. But the reality is it only takes one person, just like an ADA lawsuit or an SMS lawsuit that can come in. If you think about SMS, it's TCPA, CITA. You know, there's all these terminologies and I'm not here to scare you, but the reality is you should make sure that you're staying relevant.

Yes.

And if you have any doubt, there's so many resources out there. Message me, message Chase. I'm sure one of us can at least point you to either A legal expert, or we might even have an example for you or an answer for you if you're ever in doubt. So I highly, highly make sure that you as a retention marketer or an executive or a founder, whatever you are listening to this, you're definitely looking at those regular legal check-ins.

Heck yeah, completely agree. And dude, that's kind of the recap by what we mean, you know, for ethical marketing, right? It's really when you take the stance of being an ethical marketer, You're taking a mid to long-term approach, right? You're not gonna cut corners. You're not focused on the short term. Obviously the short term's important and you do wanna crush it and maximize it, but you need to do it in a way that's sustainable, a way that's sustainable for your company, for your customers, for your subscribers, really everyone involved. And with that, right, like you do want people to stay on your list because they want to be there, not because they're trapped or tricked. When they're trapped or tricked, I like that. that's when they lose and ultimately you're gonna lose. Don't push people too far because you don't know which crazy person you're gonna push to their ends and it's gonna really be costly for you in more ways than one. And again, it's really not that hard. So to really make it plain and simple in layman's terms, a positive example of this. So it's a brand that's being transparent about why they're emailing and always providing value. So educational content, how-to guides, et cetera, where the negative kind of the The opposite side of that coin would be a brand that's using misleading subject lines and saw a massive unsub spike and legal warnings. Don't be in that camp. Be in the one of just being a good person. It really comes down to being a good person and being a marketer that's focused on experiences for everyone involved that are positive.

Yeah. Quick takeaways from that right away. Check your next subject line for any misleading language. Review unsubscribe process and ensure it's friendly and user-friendly, right? Like those are the 2 tips we have. All right, Chase, as we wrap up this pod and we're at the end of today's episode, what are our key takeaways here? I feel like we got a couple key, good key takeaways.

Yeah, I got 4 quick ones for you. So number 1, ethical retention marketing is about honesty and respect while still diving, driving results. So again, we're not saying ignore results, ignore ROI, ignore metrics. We're just saying do so in a way that is gonna allow you to continue doing your business activities Now and again, right? Not just something that's going to work today, but something that's going to work tomorrow, three months, twelve months, twenty-four months into the future because you're doing things ethically. That's number one. Number two is avoid misleading tactics. Again, these can be illegal under things like CAN-SPAM or you know a bunch of states have rules and laws and regulations. A bunch of countries do as well. So don't do those types of things that are going to be. in jeopardy of different laws and ultimately are going to harm your brand. Number 3 would be maintain list hygiene and allow people to opt out easily, right? Make the unsub apparent. Allow people to do it with one click. You know, don't make people jump through hoop after hoop to get off your list because it's not going to end well. It's going to end in spam complaints. And spam complaints are the worst thing you can do for your brand. Unsubs, you know, in kind of small doses aren't that bad. Unsubs in any kind of dosage, it's bad. So you want to make that easy so that you can protect your brand and comply with laws. And then last but not least, number 4 is doubling down on the whole transparency. Just being transparent is how you win the game across the board. Customers are going to reward your brand for just being a good brand, a brand that someone that they can trust and look up to.

That's the name of the game, man. Authentic human marketing ultimately is the name of the game more than ever all these days. With that chase, dude, that's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed this podcast today, make sure you like, subscribe, follow, leave us a rating on your favorite podcast listening platform, and you can follow this show on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, and still TikTok today. And now there's a few ways that you can continue to connect with us. Number one, first, we encourage you to join our newsletter, Ecom Email Marketer. We drop newsletters only about retention marketing each and every week. We've got links in the show notes. Second, we have a brand new certification program out. If you're a retention marketer or learning about retention specifically in email and SMS, we have a brand new certification program out and it's available. It's 25+ hours, includes a full exam, and we'll give you a certification that proudly presents on your social, use it to get a new job, or even ask for a promotion. It's found at ecomemailcertified.com. Use coupon code SENDIT, all one word, S-E-N-D-I-T, to get $100 off your certification today. And oh, if you want to follow us on social media and get more of these tips, Chase, where are you found?

Most platforms Chase Diamond, no A in Diamonds.

Cool, and I'm found mostly on LinkedIn and X today. All right, Chase. Next week, using behavior triggers to automate perfectly timed email and SMS. Let's get into what that really means and how you should be doing that effectively. With that, we'll see you on the next show.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list. Throw and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.