Email Marketing Etiquette – The Do’s and Don’t’s of Adswaps

Adswaps are a way that marketers can easily build their subscriber lists – simply by exchanging promotional emails to eachothers list. Adswaps are agreements and a virtual handshake to exchange list members. It is usually a win-win situation where numbers of subscribers are added to each joint venture partners list in roughly similar proportions. Most marketers are pretty familiar with how they work but there are some pretty important ‘do’d and don’t’s regarding adswaps that can easily be overlooked.

1) Don’t be afraid to change your JV partners text to suit your list and style. I made this mistake early on with adswaps in that I would blindly copy a colleagues email text without adapting it in any way. So I would send things out that read something like:

Subject: Earn 3 zillion dollars next week with secret system

Email:

Hi {!firstname_fix}

My lifelong friend Ivor Bigun has given me access to his secret code that will make you 3 zillion dollars next week. He’s only letting me have this code to give to you.You can get it here but it’s only available for a few days, so hurry…..blah, blah, blah…

Now, Iíve exaggerated a little here for dramatic effect but you get the picture. This is a deceptive and cheap email to send to your list and they are unlikely to respect you for it, regardless of whether the product is any good or not. It’s your list so make sure you are happy with what you are sending them. If you are uncomfortable with the email text your are given then don’t use it.

2) Under no circumstances exaggerate your list to your partner to gain an advantage as this is dishonest. Also, make sure that you give the right statistics to your partner. They are interested in the actual number of sent Broadcasts and NOT your total number of subscribers.

3) Make sure you set the same time schedule to send out your broadcast. Again, this is pretty straightforward but I stuffed this up once by trying to calculate the time differences between countries and scheduling my swap at local time in Australia. I needn’t have bothered as within Aweber (and I assume other auto-responders have similar) the default setting is ‘Eastern’ and this will be the case in 99% of cases so all should be fine. Do not change the timing agreed upon. It is worth experimenting with which time of day (and which day) works best for a swap. The standard approach is to set at 0600 AM, but I have a few big name swappers that like to mail at 0900 AM, after the bulk of emails have gone out.

4) Do not send to segments of your list with no prior notice. I’ve heard of a few cases of this but it has not happened to me. This is a practice where one swapper delays sending out to their total subscribers until they see how many clicks they are getting and then they will release to another segment. This is dishonest.

5) If you agree on the offers you are going to swap then you should not change that offer at any time without prior consultation with your partner. Again, this is not common but does happen – that the link you provide is suddenly changed to an affiliate link. This is sneaky and dishonest.

6) Finally, make sure that you are prepared to provide support to your partners subscribers. Sometimes links can fail for whatever reason. If you are contacted by a subscriber then provide what support and assistance you can to help them with their download. This is good Adswap protocol and a reasonable expectation on both parties.

Good adswapping

Pete

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Tags:adswap,Joint venture

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