The Whitelist

Next week’s DMAnc meeting takes on the behemoth of direct mail.

Email marketing has many advantages over direct mail but the reverse is also true. A direct mail piece might be so clever it ends up stuck on a refrigerator. An email won’t ever find a place of honor like that!
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I had the chance today to exchange pleasantries and more with a true legend, Arthur Hughes.  If there’s a human alive that has done more in the field of database marketing than he, I haven’t met him.

Arthur has a new book out, ’Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies: From Hunting to Farming’.  I’ve picked-up a copy, and recommend you do the same.

Thank you, Arthur, for all you’ve done for the eMarketing profession.

Not only does Clickmail have a Twitter account, but we use it, too.  Be cool like Fonzie and follow us!

My brain has defrosted just enough to impart the following observations:

An recurring theme here in Miami is how to best reduce the anxiety and friction caused by asking people for information.  Ask a web visitor for their email address or other details and they get their back up.  So the zillion yen question is, how to build the ideal email and landing page?   (more…)

Hot off the presses, ClickMail commits to sponsoring the fine work of the Email Experience Council.  Look for us as a regular contributor to the eec blog!

CAN SPAM. Love it or hate it, it serves a purpose. The real problem isn’t the legislation itself, it’s the fact that we need it in the first place because so many email marketers don’t live up to the standards of email marketing vendors like ClickMail and email marketing people like you.

But the unsubscribe option—required by CAN SPAM—isn’t all bad. Sure it lets people opt out of your email marketing in-house list, but guess what? If they’re opting out, you don’t want to be marketing to them anyway. They’re actually doing you a favor because they’re helping you figure out what’s working and what’s not in your permission-based email marketing initiatives.

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Lyris’ whitepaper “87 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing” is—surprisingly—focused on permission-based email marketing. Why surprising? Because one wouldn’t think there’d be 87 different things to say about the topic. Experienced email marketers are all using double opt-in and only emailing their in-house, permission-based lists, right?

Wrong. Hence the whitepaper. And they make a great point that is easily lost in the world of email marketing. We hear a lot about targeted and one-to-one marketing, yet plenty of companies are still doing batch and blast.

Maybe because it’s email they think it’s “direct” marketing, but really it’s just mass marketing. It’s no different than mailing your promotional postcard to 100,000 recipients who may or may not be your target market. And what’s a typical response rate to a direct mail campaign? A measly 1 ½ %. That’s because that’s mass marketing too, just like TV and radio ads.

As the whitepaper states, “…the more experienced email marketers realize that a far more effective way may be to email to a smaller list of individuals who have actually expressed a desire to hear from you. Why? Because when you market to people who have told you expressly that they want to hear from you, you can expect to see these results.”

Email marketing isn’t about quantity, although technology makes it easy to think that way. Like all marketing, it’s about getting results. And email is also a great way to build and reinforce relationships too, when done directly.

Get the whitepaper here.