The Whitelist

ClickMail’s expertise is featured prominently in a story about problems with White House email communications by the Washington DC-based National Journal.  When the Journal needed an expert on email marketing and email best practices, the call went out to ClickMail CEO Marco Marini.

Read the full story here, as reproduced in the Journal’s blog on lobbying and advocacy, Under the Influence.

According to a recent eMarketer article on email unsubscribes, only 5% of respondents said they never unsubscribe. That means 95% do! That’s something to think about if you work in email marketing.

And some subscribe quite often. The article states 55% of email subscribers in North America unsubscribe occasionally and 14% frequently. Again, another high number.
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Here’s an email marketing challenge for you: Today, think of three ways to grow your in-house email list that are unusual, but still fall under the realm of permission-based email marketing . You know to use Forward to a Friend, you ask people for email addresses at trade shows, you have a prominent email signup link on your web site…but there are so many other ways to promote your email program and get people signed up.
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Email policies are important.  Not just the email governance policy that protects a company’s corporate interests, but a policy that protects your subscribers from potential email marketing abuse; and your relationship with them as a result.

It’s permission-based email marketing – meaning you got their permission, and your subscribers trusted you enough to hand over their email addresses in the first place. And you as the email marketer must guard that relationship when others in your company want to take advantage of the fast and cheap nature of email marketing for a quick financial fix.

To differentiate it from the Privacy Policy that reassures your subscribers you won’t share their email address, this policy is one that ensures you’ll treat your subscribers with respect. That means:

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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.