Comments on: E-mail Marketing: 3 Reasons to Do It

By: Boyd Butler

Boyd Butler — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:58:54 +0000

Email that is valuable to the recipient and comes from a trusted source is opened. Spam isn’t. You’d open an email from your best friend but not from someone in Nigeria offering $1,000,000 for sending your bank account details.

Email is no different to a letter. You don’t open junk mail. You don’t open junk emails.

The key is therefore making it valuable, sending it to the right people, getting it opened, getting it read, getting the recipient to tell you what they think/want, getting them to anticipate the next one through priming, and so on.

I’d also really like to offer you one huge tip as my contribution for the year.

When you send out an email make sure that you get all the email recipient addresses that don’t open your email. And then re-send the same email, with a different subject line. This has had a massive 17% increase in the numbers of opened emails for my firms.

There are a few other things like this on my website over here in London.

By: Diana D'Itri

Diana D'Itri — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:56:20 +0000

I’m with you on this one. Email is great. NO matter how much you hate spam (and we all do) there is nothing better than using email to communicate with your warm contacts. Unlike facebook and the others, email is private. Unlike print, it saves trees. Unlike calling, it’s more convenient for both parties. Email “blasts” give companies who practice this type of marketing, a bad name. Not to mention that they are ineffective, much like a “shotgun” approach. Best practices for email marketing include:
1. Clear objectives (what am I trying to accomplish?)
2. Knowing your audience and their tolerance level (how often should I send?)
3. Simple and concise messaging (Is my message relevant to my recipient?)

By: Lemonaid_nt

Lemonaid_nt — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:03:08 +0000

The best approach to email is to allow the recipient to control the number of emails they receive. Consumer’s want to know what the latest news is, or the latest promotion, but not every single day. The only choice left is to unsubscribe. I’ve appreciated those companies that allow you to decide the acceptable frequency of the communication.

By: Aaron Street

Aaron Street — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:31:58 +0000

Sam,

I’m pretty sure Karin is not advocating email spam as an effective marketing technique.

Good email marketing and bad email marketing are very different things, and only one of them is going to improve your business in the long-run.

Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing” is a great resource for understanding the difference.

By: Sam Glover

Sam Glover — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:49:39 +0000

All of what you say may be true, but I hate e-mail marketers with the burning fire of a million suns. I would like to boil them all in oil.

The only exceptions are those who have a non-sneaky opt-in campaign. In other words, the recipients knowingly and actively sign up to be on the mailing list.