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!

That said, they influence each other too, and some of what will be covered during the DMAnc luncheon applies to email marketing as much as to direct mail.

On June, 17th at the DMAnc luncheon, speaker Seth Berman, Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations for Blue Shield of California, presents a case study titled: “Increasing Direct Mail Performance in a Challenging Environment Through Better Targeting and Analytics.”

At the event, learn to:

• Evaluate your current direct mail targeting strategy to uncover new opportunities
• Identify the most important metrics to improve, plus establish a single point of truth for those metrics. Then set a baseline for current performance and set improvement goals
• Implement an action plan to immediately improve direct mail performance

But keep in mind how these lessons can apply to your email marketing strategy too!

Find out more or register here.

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.

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?  

An email or landing page that reduces the (often reasonable) concerns that people have when they give out information over the internet is what is needed.  While there is no magic bullet to solve this problem, there are many things one can do.

As an example,  if your landing page says ‘I won’t sell or share your information’ right next to the area where you’re asking for information, a whopping 66% of your visitors will be more likely to share their contact details.

More on this important topic later.

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.

Think of the unsubscribe as a metric you can use to measure how well you’re serving your target audience. As we’ve noted in another blog post, an increase in your unsubscribe rate can indicate that you’re over-messaging your audience.

Sometimes we get so focused on email delivery and fancy email marketing tools and choosing the next great email provider that we lose sight of the most important piece of the email marketing puzzle: the customer.

Next time you’re reviewing your email marketing data, don’t frown when you see the unsubscribes, but smile. This is data, data you can use to improve your email marketing campaigns. Keep track of your unsubscribe rate, notice when it goes up or down, do your A/B testing, and improve, improve, improve. Always be relevant to your audience and learn to love those who opt out. They’re teaching you a lesson you can apply to increase your email marketing ROI. How great is that?

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.