Email Marketing Tips

First – Excellent blog.
The things you said about email marketing are so true. Only when one will die other will evolve, may be email marketing is in a transformation phase. But may be its success depends on reaching the right people. Like giving food to hungry not to someone who ain’t hungry. Like, I’m a programmer and I always read the mails which has some lessons on CSS and XHTML. I ignore all other blogs.
Thanks for reading,
Aditya

I think SPAM is a bit old news, but company mailing lists are a great means of communication and can provide very cost effective marketing, especially in these credit conscious times.

Most of what I see being sold as e-mail marketing and as opt-in is neither.

Dawud, If everyone was as competent at this as you and I are, the world would be a better place.

Mike,
But do you get any email that you would consider an interruption in your day/life/business?

Dating,
Can you give an example of something new you’ve seen that you thought was good?

Bill,
I don’t lump opt-in ezines with spam. I see them in two different categories – one has permission and one doesn’t.

And since I mentioned permission, do you see permission marketing ever as interruption marketing?

Chris,
I don’t disagree. Yet isn’t this still a case that you have to interrupt someone’s life to stay in front of them?

Pedro,
But do you think the answer is with the perception of the receiver?

If I indicate that I am interested in being alerted to specials and sales from a specific company about a specific line of products, there is a good chance I’ll buy something if I receive an email alerting me to a good offer.

I don’t even open spam, or even the vast majority of email from sources I am unfamiliar with.

People who subscribe to legitimate ezines choose to subscribe to them and accept the cost in terms of advertising inserted into the content.

Email marketing as practiced by spammers is not the same thing.

When someone buys a list of e-mail addresses or harvests a list of email addresses and sends e-mail to them, that is spam and that should die as quickly as possible.

Growing a legitimate list of people who are genuinely interested in your topic and who opt in to receiving information (FROM YOU) on that topic and then sending them information about that topic is not dying and will never die.

To say that email is evolving is putting it more correctly, I think. With RSS and other innovations, email marketing has to evolve, just like anything else in the web 2.0 world.

George,
I think it is. What social media is doing is changing the playing field so that now business owners, ad folks and marketers have less control of the market. The future will sure be interesting.

Bert,
Sounds interesting. And I agree, at least for now, that people will continue to signup for lists for companies they trust. I just wonder how this is changing.

Mark,
Actually, I do. You can read about it in my post Why Email Marketing IS Interruption Marketing.

But one thing to note, while I don’t, personally, appreciate being interrupted, I don’t think it’s wrong or unethical. And I use email marketing myself. Yet I know that things are changing – however slowly.

The way my email client, Eudora, works, I choose when I’m going to check my email.

I don’t choose when the phone rings. i don’t choose when someone knocks on the door. When I drive, billboards are everywhere, and unless I want to wear a blindfold, I can’t avoid seeing them.

Even with Twitter, I choose to have twhirl on my desktop, but once I’ve put it there, I don’t choose when my eyes get pulled to look at it because it’s moved- a new tweet has arrived.

I can ignore twitter. I can let the phone go to voicemail. I can ignore the knocking at the door, draw the shades, and hide behind the couch. I can studiously ignore billboards. But, the input is still flowing into my environment.

With email, none of it happens until I say so.

With this in mind, would you really say that email is interruption marketing?