Email is still the King in Internet marketing. Many people consider it the most powerful promoting tool ever devised, and if this still hasnt really changed.
Why is it so The main reason must be the wide use of email. One study published by the US Department of Commerce established that using email made 84% of all Internet users activity online, and that nearly half (45%) of the US population now uses email.
Another reason must be that email ads produce by far the highest response rates among all the means of promotion available today. 2004 reports from advertising agencies show that average response rates on the Internet today are the following:
Mind it, these click-thrus are for email more than six times greater for email ads than for the next best method!
As one eloquent marketer aptly put it:
[Email marketing is] immediate, inexpensive and in-your-face. It sells, promotes, brands, informs, reminds, creates buzz and best of all, its cost effective.
If its so good then why is it so bad Marlon Sanders in his recent report speaks about The Black Hole. His report is devoting to the improbably low percentage of his own emails reaching their intended receivers. Mind you, Marlon not only doesnt send any SPAM, his mails are also being metuculously checked for spam-words, and he simply does everything he can to have his mails and ezines delivered. Thats the large part of his job and hes very good in it.
And what are the results of his efforts The percentages he published for those most popular free email accounts are simply hair-rising. One well-known provider simply trashes 100% of Marlon mailings, others evidently are making their best to reach equally impressing result.
Of course, SPAM is a nuisance and causes technical problems, viruses, phishing and other malicious activities are even more harmful. Those email provider are protecting people... But it is nevertheless a paranoia, where you are practically guaranteed that none of your emails sent to a free US account will reach the person, if you happened to use in its header one of the many words that those over-powerful Well-Doers Protecting People (Mostly From Themselves) dont particularly like. Such a word is for example friend...
Of course I know its hard to live without any friends, and it may cause irrational and aggressive behaviour... Its simply a little sad that not verybody is allowed to play their complexes as easilly as Netscape or Microsoft, and that people having friends cant call them that. Or that Marlon Sanders isnt allowed to send out his ezines as both he and their readers intend.
So now, after SPAM, or whatever some powerful and friend-less bureaucrat is considering to be SPAM, is not less aboundant, those anti-spam measures are evidently responsible for most of the problems with email -- generally and specifically as a marketing tool.
But dont despair! Theres no problem in this world that a smart marketer couldnt use to his/her advantage. We are concentrating on the email so we wont discuss all those technical devices, trying to substitute email in some degree, that crop around. Some of them are new and others are just existing devices, like messengers, applied to marketing. There are however other ways to profit from The Big Brothers powerful (in more than one way) complexes.
Knowing what day should you send ads to those precious leads of yours will not make you rich as quickly as creating an new tools that would supplant the email and would become generally accepted would. To outsmart Netscape and the others you would need more. But you can, nevertheless, outsmart most other marketers.
So what is that perfect day for sending ads Still some time ago the common knowledge had it that its Wednesday. And common knowledge was pitiully wrong: Wednesday is in fact the worse day for sending ads. It has been revealed by Mark Joyner in his famous Secret Report, which only revealed that the best days are Friday and Sunday. With Friday offering more than twice as high results.
If only marketing was so simple! Recently one young wolf has announced that it could have been that way, but now the best day is Tuesday. Still, no ad-tracking guru seems to have anything good to say for Wednesday, and we are at least left with three GOOD days, and one awfully BAD day. Knowing those facts should no doubt help you a lot.
But wait, theres now even more interesting data on this particular issue! I recently met a study where they divided their mailing list in two parts: one were people with those free accounts that generously treat you like a mentally handicapped child, the other were people with paid or company-provided accounts. Then they compared the click-thrus for both groups for all days of the week. The result Those free accounts gave the best results on weekends, while those better ones on working days. Pretty logical but nobody seems to have made it before.Or at least has not told us about it.
Now, the great trader Victor Sperandeo recommended that you always should try to understand the reasons and principles behind particular phenomena. (I guess he took it from Ayn Rand, but its him who earned money on stocks every month for 30 years or so, so for me hes the bigger authority of those two.) If you succeed, you will be able to predict in some degree the future. Future in stock market, or future in email marketing. Or in anything for that matter.
In my humble opinion one doesnt need to seek any other factors to explain the phenomenon we were just talking about. We only need two factors:
A much more sophisticated study would of course be needed to establish WHY those people behave so, but my private hypotesis would be that they read emails -- ads included -- where they are bored. And those with company accounts are bored most during their work hours, and those with free accouts (but at the cost of their own freedom to send and receive whatever they want) are bored on weekends, they probably are not very popular socially and have no hobbies (another potential gold mine for smart marketers, please offer me a JV if you are to build an Empire on this invaluable discovery!).
One thing is worth noting here: today, if you are allowed to legally send ads to paid or at least company-provided email accounts, you must be quite a marketer! Those people must be on your legal mailing list, so its about back-selling and similar hyper-advanced stuff. The normal struggling marketer is simpy stuck with those Big Broder hand-out emails for a long, long time. But there ARE in fact some prctical ways to be allowed sendig to peoples real i.e. better than those wretched free accounts.
For instance, if youre an opt-in list admin you will have the right to send such ads to your members. And there are some services that explicitly allow that, usually not for free but its not that expensive either. At least so far isnt. This may well be another useful thought you get from those ramblings. If its not, at least you read a longish, almost-philosiphical marketing text... If you reached down to here you cant possibly say it wasnt at all interesting, can you
I was planning to say in this article something about list submmitters and blasters, but it will need to wait to some other time. Those devices must have quite an impact on the email marketing, and it would be worth some studying. Let me just say two things about blasters:
Well, thats the situation in email marketing for today. Soon it may be radically different. Still, applying priciples, looking for deep causes, reading reports and articles while trying to figure out where the Guru is sincere and where hes just after your money. You can never go wrong with those things! In fact, youve got about 93% that they will always keep you one stepahead of the greedy crowd. Which is what the marketing is all about, isnt it
Piotr Obminski is an Internet marketer based in Gdansk in Poland.
Hes open for any honest and profitble JV.
Some of his sites are:
http://net-profit-udder.com
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There are many avenues available for marketing online products. Radios, TV advertisements, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and that big sign on the highway are examples of the traditional marketing approach. Yes, these approaches can work, but then after spending a lot of money its tough to calculate return on marketing investment. Now these days, there are two effective and low-cost approaches, search engine marketing and Email Marketing.
Email Marketing starts with the use of email accounts. 90% of the adult internet users have personal/ business email accounts in unites states. Millions of people across the country use email almost everyday. Business or personal use, people has just lost that old traditional mail approach.
Most of the business professionals and technocrats today check their email accounts more than voicemail on their phone.
Millions of people subscribes for information they are interested in everyday.
Although spammers are killing the charm of email marketing and everyone is effected.
The way I define Email marketing is as below:
Email marketing is a technique to reach the maximum number of people or businesses through Email in a shortest amount of time with minimum spending.
Starting with small businesses, universities, non-profit organizations, associations, online publications and many giant corporations are using email marketing in one way or another. Small businesses uses email marketing as sales effort, associations uses it to send information to their members and information subscribers, and giant corporations are using it to increase brand awareness.
The fundamentals of Email marketing a regular or online product is no different from those that apply to conventional marketing. A compelling message must be developed to convey the product and achieve the core objectives of the email marketing campaign (Increased brand awareness, brand image, trial etc.) Unlike other marketing techniques, Email marketing gives you all the reports, statistics and results in real-time. I believe Email Marketing is the only technique that gives you perfect calculations of the Return on Marketing Investment.
Email marketing can be most useful tool in the following areas:
Brand development
Customer relationship management
Boost sales
Increase product awareness
Above of all, Email marketing success depends upon well executed creative development (message creation) and targeting. Reach to millions in a day, the only way is Email Marketing!
Mike Savaliya is an Editor with a leading web-based Email Marketing service provider. Create, send, and track HTML email newsletters. Free to try!