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Why email marketing doesn't work !

by davidcaruso Prodigy(November 2007) (rank 48th)
 
 
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Email marketing works in many different ways, but mainly it is about sending out emails who are tagged in one way or another allowing to trace the addressee on the website if he clicks on the link inside the email.

The idea is to use opt-in lists. Opt--in lists you have collected yourself from visitors on your website. This sounds like fishing in the same pool over and over again. In this way you never are going to expand the number of interested parties.

Thus you need to buy lists. Lists from list brokers.

Now pushing people into your website is almost like luring them to visit your website. Moreover you have to build a special ‘Landing page’ to ultimately keep their interest further as they are one click away to their next more interesting website.

Have you already questioned yourself?
What is the likelihood of sending an email to someone with an appropriate message at the appropriate time?
This is multiplying probabilities:
For instance:
  • Probability of addressee related to your proposition: 35%
  • Probability of appropriate message (is he interested): 17%
  • Probability of timing (now or next year or later): 10%
This becomes: 0.35 times 0.17 times 0.10 = 0.00595 or 0.6%
Meaning in order to get one interested person, you have to send out 168 emails.
Thus if you want 10 possible Leads, you need to send out 1680 emails. WOW !

These 10 Leads still need to be qualified, thus your return on emails will be much lower.
(Note: these numbers are just an example and differ from industry to industry and product or service proposed.)

Conclusion: massive amounts of email addresses are required. These you only can obtain by buying them. Spending more money.

The inverse Model:
Your website has visitors.
These visitors are interested parties, as they visit because they have found you on the Internet.
Thus if you only could identify these visitors by company name, your cold calling or email would have a high probability of success.
For further information on Website visitor identification visit LEADSExplorer
  • Get more lead opportunities
  • Identify your business opportunities with Leads, Customers, Ex-Customers, and Missed Customers
  • Nurture and convert interested parties into Leads, into Prospects, into Sales using the integrated CRM
  • Get Sales reasons to: call, email, send letter, leaflet, visit: using the appropriate, timely message
  • Re-contact the indicated returning known visitors (Customers, Ex-Customers, Missed Customers)
  • Reduce significantly the acquisition cost for: Leads, Prospects and getting Appointments
  • Reduce significantly the Customer Retention costs
  • Internet Data Mining for Company info and finding Contacts.
 
 

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Related keywords: based, email, emailings, identification, lists, marketing, opt-in, 0, permission, sales, sales2, visitor, website, 2

 
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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

XavierV
Vote:

May 2008

Emailing is not about crunching marketing numbers. It is about insights and psychometrics. Unfortunately, that's not a concrete speech when you have to report to your superiors who just expect numbers and facts from you.


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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

Linda
Vote:

February 2008

Don't forget you can do a lot with email marketing list segmentation. Email marketing is a highly profitable and effective strategy for ecommerce/B2C websites (some claim it has the highest ROI) but you have to know what you're doing!

For B2B it's a good idea to look into drip marketing tools. Expensive, but again, can be profitable when done correctly.
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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

Georgegoss
Vote:

February 2008

Do you have solid plans in place to retain and grow your existing customers? Success in leveraging relationships with your best customers can help significantly boost your revenue results.Add 100% opted-in, Accurate, Deliverable email addresses to your existing database Acquirelists email appending services add 100% opted-in email addresses to your existing postal database. Only our appending services can provide accurate deliverable e-mail addresses. Our Email& Data Appending services include: •email appending •phone and fax appending •mailing address appending for Direct Marketing •Alternate contact & Title appending •Targeted Contact Discovery and List Building •Reverse appending •B2C data enhancement •Database Management

http://www.acquirelists.com/emailappending-acq.htm
Phone : 646-619-4865

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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

jdawkinsatl
5.00 (Excellent) Vote: WOW! WOW! WOW! WOW! WOW!

January 2008

Well I don't really know where to begin, but I guess I will start with the title of your article. I'll admit that direct marketing, which includes email marketing, is not always the best medium for promoting your business, product, or service, but to say it doesn't work is just absurd. Being an email marketing professional, I could quickly take offense to this statement, but instead I'll focus on some of the pros of email marketing.
  1. Customer Relationship Management - Email marketing is a great tool for customer retention and customer communications. Why? Because it can be extremely cost effective compared to call centers, or even traditional direct mail campaigns.
  2. Targeted Reach - For retail companies, email marketing is a great way to remind, or inform, customers of the great products, promotions, or services that your company may provide. If done correctly, the effectiveness and reach could make for a very profitable campaign.
  3. Cost efficiency - Email is great way to communicate to regions where the local infrastructure does not support traditional mail or communication, efficiently. For instance one of my clients that is a VERY large transportation company based out of Atlanta, only communicates with customers in the Asia-Pacific region through email. Why? Because it's targeted, and much more cost effective than sending letters or developing out a multi-million dollar call center, or even outsourcing those call center needs to local providers.
  4. Sales Growth - Email marketing is a great way to up-sell and cross-sell existing or potential customers. The fact is targeted and personalized messages, based off of customer behavior has proven to be an effective way to generate additional sales and sales opportunities.
  5. Viral and Flexible - Also, email marketing offer the flexibility of personalization, but can be an extremely effective way to go viral. If an email has the right promotion, a recipient may just forward that information on to a friend that may be in the market for your product or service, even if the original recipient is not. It's the next best thing to word of mouth, which is one of the most effective ways of marketing. I mean when was the last time someone re-mailed a direct mail piece. Never! It just doesn't happen.
  6. Highly Effective - Lastly email marketing can be effective without large lists. Of course many email marketers would love to have a large list to blast messages to, because it increases their reach, but I can't think of a single marketer who wouldn't love a list of 10,000 people where, 50 to 60% actually took an action on the mailing as opposed to a list of 100K and only 3 to 5% actually even opened the mailing. Why? Because it's about relevance not volume. Buying a list may increase your volume, but it will do little for your effectiveness, and will surely hurt a consumer's confidence in your brand.
I could probably think of at least 10 more reasons why email marketing "works" but I'm starting to think that this article is merely here to plug an alternative. That is ok, I just think that taking an obviously biased opinion for a site devoted to e-marketers is just a quick way to get criticized or ignored, but Hey maybe that's what you are going for. Nonetheless interesting perspective. I've heard someone say the same thing about SEO, buying ads, creating affiliate programs etc, but the true marketer will use a variety of mediums to find the best marketing mix. That's Marketing 101.
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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

Alex-S-
4.00 (Good) Vote: Interesting Interesting Interesting Interesting Interesting

December 2007

Oh wait - i get the point of this article - it's called "plugging my company" :)

Content will get more readership every time over bought lists. There's a fine line between buying lists of email adresses and spamming in my mind and hey  -guess what  -i get an email from a company i didn't register with - it NEVER gets read  - it's why i have a delete button. 

Just like real life - i get the pottery barn catalog BC i sign up for it - but when i get a flyer, circular whatever from someone i've never given my address to  - it ends up in the trash can - no matter how good a service they might be offering.

Hopefully conversational marketing will continue to increase, combined with healthy content marketing and thus making junk email a thing of the past.

Sorry to sound harsh, but there you have it - a marketer, turned end user/consumers view of how it feels to receive unsolicited mail :)
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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

vanessa
Vote:

December 2007

"Fishing in the same pool over and over again"? Yeah, it's called 'repeat business' and most retailers are happy to get it. Send me an unsolicited email from a list broker and see how fast I delete it! I know what companies I give my email address to.
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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

Malcolm-Auld
Vote:

December 2007

Not sure what marketer would firstly be able to 'buy' rather than rent e-mail lists and secondly bother to send unsolicited e-mail messages - maybe the UK sells lists, but most countries don'. And of course messages to these types of lists won't work. People don't open unsolicited e-mails, despite opting-in to lists. And there isn't an e-mail distributor worth their salt who will send e-mail messages, unless they have evidence the list is opt-in and spam compliant.

But sending e-mail to your own house list with content based on data supplied to you at opt-in stage is a very cost-effective and powerful way to do business.

The rule of thumb with e-mail is simple - the from line gets it opened and the subject line gets it deleted. That is, if they know who it's from they'll consider opening the message, but if the subject content isn;t relevant, they won;t open it and delete without a second thought.

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Re: Why email marketing doesn't work !

rene-lemerle
Vote:

November 2007

i'm not sure that buying lists is the only way to make email marketing work...we've grown to a list of over 100,000 newsletter subscribers through perseverance, quality content and attractive propositions to join (tools, news, advice, tips etc)...

while buying a list is one option, sometimes offering useful and informative email service is enough to attract people to join your list...and through building an audience relationship, provides you a great (free) email marketing medium.
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