Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

The reason it is an unwritten rule is because it's bad Marketing.

One of the written rules of Marketing is: reach out and make yourself known to people who don't know you.

To effectively market by email or any other method I need to have a good product, a strong offer, a respectful approach, an honest pitch and a compelling value to offer.

But I don't need permission to tell someone about it.

Markitek,

I can't say that I agree with you...with email marketing, especially on the B2C side, permission is pretty darn important.

I do not think that an email address that was given up as part of some contact or transaction is carte blanche to add to a marketing list

The Caller ID analogy is spot on. Just because you HAVE my number doesn't give you the right to call me once a week and tell me about your business.

Same goes for email.

Thanks for the support.


Markitek, you can still get your message out there with email. BUT, If I'm better acquainted/introduced to your company or your offer, I'm more likely to support it.

The factors you might really be interested in as the advertiser are:

- Less cost per acquisition (assuming you use an email delivery service that is priced per/email or per/fixed amount).
- The fewer emails you have to send to get a certain audience to engage with you, the better.

- Stronger impact on your selected audience.
- People who don't realize why they are getting your promo email (or didn't sign up for it), are far more likely to put it in a "Junk Mail" or "Spam" folder, or just outright delete it.


I still want your company to reach-out, but not to be invasive about it. Some websites will ask you to create an account, and automatically opt you in for promo emails until you unsubscribe (in some cases twice). And many of these sites send me something completely unrelated to what I wanted when I last visited (some as frequently as every few hours!).



Perhaps a certain situation exists where I'll be more ept to accept ONE piggy-backed email. Amazon actually does this quite well--
Lets say I browse the site looking for a particular item, but I don't quite make up my mind. With ONE email 'touch' (or follow-up), they send a well-customized email with their best reviewed, best priced, or best selling items from the exact category I was looking at.

What I like about this is that Amazon doesn't hunt me down every hour or every day to say, hey that item you wanted is still available. They realize I'm having trouble deciding, and make one concise set of recommendations, to ease my decision. They wait a little, too, before sending any follow-up.

Most importantly: Amazon also provides a very clear set of privacy tools which allow me to "turn OFF" these personalized emails altogether.





I guess the original post was a tad out of 'spite'. But, the situation still holds true. I don't need (or want) to know everything your company is up to. Only certain aspects (or products) from your business apply to me. The better my relationship is with your company, the more I'll be interested in it. Hence, I'll sign up for more of your newsletters or promotions.