I’m sure by now anyone who is responsible for marketing their business is familiar with Permission Marketing and the idea of pull vs push marketing.
If not, you are at least aware of how much email you get, and how annoying spam is.
So…I am very very surprised when I read this from a supposed ‘international cyber marketing expert’ (name withheld to protect the guilty);
“Why bother to capture the e-mail addresses of visitors to your website? There are two primary benefits…
First, if you have their e-mail addresses, you can send these visitors an online conversion series – a sequence of follow-up e-mails delivered by auto-responder. The conversion series gives you additional opportunities to convince these prospects to buy – and can significantly increase your overall sales.
Second, your in-house e-list is the best list of names for your e-mail marketing efforts… far better than rented opt-in lists. So the faster you can build a large e-list, the more profitable your Internet marketing ventures will become.”
Viagra, anybody?
“A sequence of E-mails delivered by auto-responder…the faster you can build a large e-list, the more profitable your Internet marketing venues will become” – welcome back to internet marketing circa 2000, we haven’t missed you. What differentiates this from spam? Not much.
Social Media is about conversation and that is a two way street.
Social Media gives you the opportunity to add value to a potential customers with the quality of information you supply on a given topic (BEFORE you talk about yourself).
I’ll take an engaged small focused group over a large list of mostly disinterested email addresses any day.
But it doesn’t cost me anything to mail out to a large list and there’s more prospects there?
Really?
What about the cost to your companies reputation for sending me spam like emails and having me vow never to buy from you, and then telling others how much you’ve pissed me off?
This does not mean you shouldn’t use email, but building a list for having a large lists sake and then thinking all you need to do is send regular email to get conversions is, to say the least, a little naive.
Nigerian scammers work this way, surely you want a better hit rate and a better reputation than them.
My wife runs a small art gallery and art site – she has over time built a list of around 450. She emails them a newsletter monthly that has interesting information about art. She will include any news about new works, and occasionally an offer. Her click through rate on her emails is very high, and the highest number of unsubscribes she has ever had in a send out was five.
The email goes out, traffic goes up.
Her subscribers know that when an email comes from her it is going to contain something they are interested in be it information about art in general, or pics of the latest work she has available…she does not try to convert them via her emails. Instead her newsletter and her blog are a way of people interested in art and artists getting a glimpse of her working life and what she does.
Does it work? A large number of the sales she generates now come from people on that list seeing something they like and coming in to buy it.
As a result of treating that list very carefully and thinking about what people are interested in (rather than selling) she has built a loyal following.
What was your last email campaign like?
Did it add to the conversation?
Or was it spammy?
