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Published
Article
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Realities for E-Mail Marketing | Spam
e-mail is no longer the mild irritant it once was – it’s clogging corporate
networks and ISP mail servers and has become a real productivity drain, forcing
corporate and consumer e-mail users to spend 20-30 minutes a day dealing with
this deluge of junk! According to recent figures, unsolicited bulk e-mail now
makes up to 36% of all e-mail, up from under 8% just over a year ago. And, what’s
worse, more and more legitimate e-mail is not getting through to recipients due
to Spam filtering taking place via ISPs and/or corporate networks.
Opt-in E-Mail Marketing 30K foot
Picture
Opt-in e-mail marketing is clearly losing some of its effectiveness
as a viable marketing tool much to the consternation of those
of us who have been advocating its effectiveness for years!
This is not to say opt-in e-mail isn’t a viable way to
market goods and services – but ROI (read response rates)
is heading south quickly and needs to be considered when assessing
the viability of this marketing process, as response rates have
dropped on average from 10-20% to 3-10%.
However,
opt-in e-mail is not disappearing off the marketing horizons – Forrester
forecasts spending on e-mail marketing will grow from $1.3B (USD) in 2001 to $6.8B
in 2006 and Jupiter Media Metrix is even more optimistic, forecasting growth rates
from $1B in 2001 to $9.4B in 2006. But, there is a dark undercurrent to these
numbers that is fueling the market growth and driving down response rates –
some opt-in agencies, brokers and media representatives are “flogging”
lists by overselling them – so caveat emptor.
Five Offsetting Marketing Strategies
| 1. |
Deploy
opt-in e-mail campaigns very selectively (!) - buy opt-in e-mail lists from legitimate
top-tier broker/list managers who are well established, are not “over-sending”
messages to list subscribers and who are constantly refreshing their list quality
by adding new subscribers. Critical questions to ask brokers include: how many
messages (“frequency” in ad speak) are sent to each list recipient per
month, how are new subscribers added and what is the percentage of new members
added per month, are they using “third party” (someone else’s list)
lists to augment their own, are their lists “double opt in” (meaning,
you sign up and then must reply to a signup confirmation to be added to a list)
and last but not least, what is their privacy policy and how strictly do they
adhere to published industry standards.
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| 2. |
Utilize
plain vanilla text link advertising – find web sites or portals that have
traffic that is comprised of customers who are in your market segment. Then, add
a text link (banner ad or graphic button if you will) to a page or pages and negotiate
a media buy that is based upon a “cost per click” basis; i.e. paying
only for traffic that clicks through to your web site.
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| 3. |
Creating
and deploying a “link strategy” campaign (i.e. getting a site listed
via other web sites) is one of the best self-sustaining interactive marketing
processes available to any company seeking to drive qualified traffic to a web
site. This process is not based upon the more traditional “reciprocal links”
procedure but incorporates some web-based competitive analysis. You start by analyzing
the links that are pointing back to your top 3-5 competitors’ web sites and
then establish relationships with these sites and also submit your site to top
and second tier directories to augment the number of links.
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| 4. |
Newsletter
insert advertising used to be considered rather mundane and not very effective.
But, if you contrast the effectiveness of this process versus the new opt-in e-mail
response rates the heretofore-lowly newsletter advertising has new and vastly
improved luster! Also, in the past it was difficult to track when and if people
clicked on a text link ad in a newsletter - but new technology enables virtually
any publisher to provide you with this information, enabling you to track your
ROI for the media buy. Finally, the real beauty of newsletter text advertising
is that it is very targeted and people want to receive the information so you
can be confident your ad will at least be viewed by some finite number of prospects.
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| 5. |
Search
Engine Ranking has come of age in the last 12-24 months – you can now easily
create and deploy a traditional (title, description, keywords inserts in content,
submissions and optimization) search engine ranking process that is augmented
with a pay per click (“PPC”) process. Deploying both ensures you derive
long term (traditional rankings) and short term (pay per click) results, with
the latter being driven by the amount of funds you have in your marketing budget.
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Lee Traupel has
20 plus years of marketing experience. He is the co-founder
of a Northern California and Brussels Belgium based, privately
held, Marketing Services and Software Company, Intelective
Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com.
Intelective focuses exclusively on providing services
to small-to-medium-sized companies that need strategic
and tactical marketing services. He can be reached at
Lee@intelective.com.
Please click here to Contact us or call toll free 530.432.8764
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