The From Line

Last year I predicted that 2007 was going to be "the year of the mailman" for email marketing, meaning that everyone including the mailman would engage in the practice.  This is evident in that Constant Contact now claims 150,000 small business customers.  The word is out that email marketing returns big bucks and the little guys want in.  True, email marketing does level the playing field between large and small online retailers since it's an affordable medium and relatively easy to press the send button.  However the newbies to the game need to understand that any monkey can click send and just as anything good in life, realizing a positive ROI from your email marketing takes time, effort, a little bit of smarts and an education.  Yes, you got to get yourself an email marketing education.  Don't be dumb and buy into unscrupulous pie in the sky marketing that you'll sell millions of dollars of your ill conceived widget by blasting some cockamamie email to a three million person list you bought for $300 from Raj in India.  And don't start crying that you didn't sell anything in the first month of sending your weekly email of skateboarding products because you were too stupid to figure out your customers are parents who purchased from you when their little Johnny was going through his skateboarding phase. 

As 2008 rolls in I welcome all newbies to the email marketing community and encourage them to seek the knowledge that will make them successful.  Before you start "blasting" a hole in your list, please read some books, do some research and talk to other people who have been engaged in the email marketing practice for a while. 
 

This time last year I predicted that basic batch and blasters would start to look at RSS as an alternative to email because of cost and deliverability.  Boy was I dead wrong.  Now that I look back at my words, what the hell was I smoking?   Most batch and blasters aren't sophisticated enough to even figure out what RSS stands for let alone how to implement it.  In my opinion RSS didn't make the slightest ding into email's market share and penetration in 2007.  All the RSS proponents that declared the death of email in 2007, where are they now?  They're either jobless or banished to work in the coat closet since they cut their email marketing budgets in 2007 when email returned 48X for every dollar invested.  Ha! Ha!

Don't get me wrong, RSS is a power tool for content syndication... but it's not replacing email.  Not for the rest of 2007 and not in 2008.

What's my prediction for 2008?  I have another few more weeks to figure it out.

I'm officially declaring that the Forward to a Friend feature email service providers include in their application as the most stupid thing ever created.  Yes, we at Gold Lasso are just as stupid for including it in eLoop.  The simple fact is that since 100% of the most common used email clients have a forward email feature people use that instead.  The Forward to a Friend gimmick is a failed attempt by email service providers to incorporate "viral" marketing tools into their applications.  We tried to reinvent the wheel and we failed.  The only thing we email service providers can do to save face is to hope that our Forward to a Friend feature reminds people to use their forward button.

Congratulations to Ari Jacoby, my old friend, confidant and former business partner on the sale of his company VoiceStar to Marchex.  Ari is a new media guru who started his career with me when we co-founded Newsletters.com.  The ideas behind the marketing at Newsletters.com were novel for the time and Ari spearheaded most of those efforts through co-branding relationships.  His success using the co-branding model at Newsletters.com was the impetus to the partnership model Ari implemented at VoiceStar.  This model helped VoiceStar to effectively compete in the pay per call marketplace against much better funded competitors.  I'm really proud of Ari and his major accomplishments.  Not only is he a great businessman, he's truly a gentleman with a good heart who deserves the fruits of his hard labor. 

Measuring your email marketing campaign is easier with reliable industry statistics to compare it to. How do your delivery rates compare with the industry average? What types of subject lines are most effective? A new, online resource from EEC has made it easier to find industry statistics that will help you evaluate your messages. 

Nearly 39 categories ranging from Email Usage and Branding to Response Metrics and Spam comprise the online repository available at www.emailstatcenter.com.  The Email Stat Center also allows visitors to search the site using Google Search.

Here is a sampling of statistics we found helpful and relevant: 

• More than 8 out of 10 email users have used the "report spam" button in their email clients' interfaces. - Email Sender and Provider Coalition (2007)
• The Spam epidemic is costing U.S. businesses $712 for each employee in lost worker productivity. - Nucleus Research (2007)
• 24.2% of web merchants have an email open rate greater than 25%
• 73% said they'd made an online purchase as a result of receiving an email offer. - Epsilon (2007)
• 45% of small businesses execs want to receive the (email) newsletter weekly, 34% said monthly. - Bredin Business Information (2007)
• 40.2% of marketers report deliverability rates between 90.1% to 100%
• 73% make the decision to click on the "report spam" or "junk" button using the from line. - Email Sender and Provider Coalition, 2007