A couple of years ago, the marketing industry began hearing rumblings about the demise of e-mail communication, a demise brought on by growing consumer interest in such things as social media and mobile messaging, online communities, cloud applications and the advent of collaborative tasking and gaming with platforms such as Google Wave.
Wading through hundreds of marketing come-ons in your inbox — many that you had unwittingly opted to receive — was no longer a necessary evil for consumers.
This was increasingly bad news for e-marketers. Eclipsed by cooler, hipper means of personal communication, e-mail with all its annoying spam appeared to be in jeopardy.
Things began to turn around a bit for marketers, however, with a new emphasis on using segmentation and targeting techniques for sales messages — targeting a customer with the most potential to buy your products or use your services would logically seem to be a lot more effective than blasting out to everyone indiscriminately.
But this kind of targeted advertising requires renting a targeted list from an e-mail list broker, and many of those e-mails were questionably gleaned.
Say you opt in to receive special e-mail offers from one well-known company you like or already do business with. When you opt in, giving them permission to send to you, were you aware that the company’s affiliates or other partners could then send you their e-blasts, too? Probably not. Pretty soon your inbox is full of messages you never realized you asked for.
Spam.
Renting a third party e-mail list, even though it’s targeted/segmented, is generally not as effective as using your own internal e-mail database. That’s because your proprietary, in-house list is comprised of subscribers who have opted to establish a relationship with you via some effective sign-up option you’ve put in place on a dedicated landing page of your Web site or on another proactive call to action.
If you’ve done things right, you have nurtured your subscriber relationships all along the way with juicy newsletters or other correspondence chock full of intriguing industry news, updates and helpful content they can use themselves and share with others.
Building a subscriber database is the most important thing you can do if you are planning to sell or promote your company online. According to www.marketingsherpa.com, more than seven times as many business-to-business marketers find in-house list marketing more effective than using anonymous third-party lists. That’s a compelling statistic, but success rests mightily on the strength of your in-house list.
And you can also look at it this way: Your e-mail is the only bit of advertising your e-subscribers have legitimately asked to receive.
Putting together the best e-mail content is another challenge. Use attention-grabbing subject lines, economical text, interesting visuals and online-only offers and specials to keep subscribers’ interest high. Your recipients want the “insider” information about your company and their industry in general. Use the format to build your customer relationships and keep them coming back for more.
Paige Henson is a marketer with more than 25 years experience. She is a partner and the creative director at HHB Advertising in Macon.
