Email Strategies, Redefining the Basics
(Page 1 of 4 )
Building a good email strategy means more than having a newsletter. Is your newsletter truly relevant to your subscribers? Or is it little more than a sales letter? This article, the first of two parts, will help you tune your approach so that subscribers actually look forward to seeing your email in their in boxes.
Email 2007
As a user and as a market researcher, my year with emails started with a bang. Between January and February I unsubscribed from four newsletters, had to help clean up an email list which had been blocked by Spamhaus, clarified my email strategies for at least the next few months, and began looking at seriously cutting down on the amount of emails (opt in) I get on my four monitored email addresses. In the process of vetting my emails and clarifying my own email sending strategies, I ran across a lot of work online done by marketers who are beginning to push the concept that email should become more valuable in increasing offline sales, and should not just be used to promote online sales. I also encountered a new definition of spam emails (which thankfully hasn't been adopted by Spamhaus or we would all be in trouble).
I will go through some of my experiences and what I learned as I contemplated writing this article. I will also explain why I unsubscribed from some emails which I started off with exceptionally well, but with time simply grew aggravating (leading to a new definition of spam).
As a dear friend of mine says, "How does all this affect the price per barrel of crude oil on the open market?" Well, if you run an email campaign, this article will give you an idea of what top web sites will be doing for the rest of the year (give or take a few). It will also help you keep your present subscriber base (this is going to get much harder as attention spans shorten) and I think most importantly, it will give you some tips on how to avoid being put on a black list.
User Experience
In order to get information on various topics, ranging from Internet marketing to health and fitness (apart from a few others), I subscribe to probably hundreds of newsletters. Some I receive on a daily basis, some weekly; of course I don't read all the emails, but I keep a lot of them for reference purposes. In fact, I actually search my emails for some keywords. As I mentioned, however, I had to sign off from three Internet marketing newsletters, and one customer service newsletter.
I had signed up for all four and had always paid attention to them (which is probably why I unsubscribed). They did everything right; they had text and HTML formats, no heavy graphics or animations, the subject lines were always relevant, and I never noticed any other strange emails from third parties 2-3 weeks after I subscribed to them. However, they practically ruined what would have been a good experience for me by not having any content whatsoever.
Next: No Content? What's the Point? >>
More Website Promotion Articles
More By Akinola Akintomide
/ 4 
AT&T devCentral & BlackBerry(r) Webcast Series: BlackBerry and GPS -Build Location Awareness into your BlackBerry Applications, July 10th -1:00PM EST. 
