Email Strategies, Redefining the Basics - No Content? What's the Point?
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Now why were these web sites sending me emails when they have no (I mean zero) content? There was a certain size range that these web sites fell into, and I believe that it will be these mini kinds of web sites that will have major problems with their email campaigns. In this current age of extremely short attention spans and dozens of emails daily, it has gotten to the point that people do not open their emails unless they see a name that they recognize. So how do these opt-in emails fail where some other types of web sites do exactly the same thing and score big (and never get unsubscribed)?
Now the four newsletters I unsubscribed from had several things in common. First they had no content; every email was a sales letter, and a lot of times they were not even trying to sell a unique hard to find product, but a product from an affiliate site (in fact, on one particular day two different emails sent me exactly the same product to buy). It's worth noting that the sites started off by offering a unique product (a tutorial, free software, some new piece of code). By the time their first product offer ended, however, they simply started selling me products every week, and referred products at that.
Obviously these are one man operations that are following a particular philosophy: create a free product, get a mailing list, sell, sell, sell. Obviously they are making money. If you intend to create a brand that will outlive you, and if you ever want to resell your operation, however, you must have content. Content will keep your subscribers.
An illustration of a web site that uses the above model successfully is Forbes, who sends content daily yet still does product listings of unique hard to find products -- their consultation services and stock tips. How do they keep me hooked? Content!
If you can't write articles every day, don't send emails every day. Technology even offers solutions where you do not have to write your own content; just get RSS feeds from related sites, put them in email format and shoot off your emails. It's worth noting here that most small marketers are pretty indifferent when it comes to innovation, and very low tech in terms of coding.
I personally know some of these small marketers and they hardly ever outsource anything. Their creative is poor and their copy is generic; they do little or no SEO and depend on a network of subscribers to which they continually sell. However, some analysts (especially Al DiGuido over at Search Engine Watch's Clickz network) believe that this kind of marketer is getting closer to a new kind of spam.
Next: A New Kind of Spam >>
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