Many people don’t start email marketing because they don’t have a list to send to.  There’s two pieces of good news here.  The first is that you didn’t try to buy a list and blast out an email.  While that isn’t necessarily spam the productivity and conversion rate will be low.  The second piece of good news is that no company has an extensive list until they decide to do an email marketing campaign.  Lists never fall from the sky to a fortunate marketer, a plan is executed to get the message to the intended audience.

So where does the list come from?  If you’re lucky, you already have it and don’t know it.  It’s amazing what some companies have buried away in a database or spreadsheet that with a little effort can be a foundation for an email marketing list.  Once the contact information has been organized an offer can be extended to these people to subscribe to the new email campaign.  The companies that don’t already have a list are undoubtedly passing up opportunities to build one.  Do clients get a chance to sign up, could an offer be added to existing forms?  Do you do event marketing, trade shows, networking events, or direct marketing?  Do you have a website with traffic?  These are viable avenues to allow people to join an email marketing campaign.

The point is everyone can get a list.  The plan is different from person to person or company to company, but the building blocks are there.  It takes a little more diligence than buying addresses or phone numbers and a system needs to be put in place so it’s not an administrative nightmare.  However, it’s possible, organizations just needs to put a plan together to build a list.  Decide to do email marketing and as you’re first agenda item, make a plan to build your initial list.  With a good plan lists tend to grow faster than expected and also tend to have a beneficial side effect of keeping information flow and management more organized.

Email marketing has become one of the most widely misused marketing media.  Because of that many myths, fears, and inaccuracies float around about how and if it should be done. 

If, can be thrown out.  It can be done.  Many companies run valuable email campaigns that drive sales leads and revenue.  If one organization can do it, so can others.  The real question is how should it be done and is it worth the time, energy, and money necessary to roll out a quality campaign.

My next posts will deal with the 4 most common excuses for not doing email marketing and some ways to overcome them.

Many people try email marketing and get frustrated by the lack of results.  Usually they rent a list, hastily put a message together, and blast it out.  Then when they get no results, they complain that email doesn’t work.  Their email didn’t work because it’s spam.  Email marketing works if it is done intelligently and responsibly.  Better yet, it builds on its own success.  The better the campaign, the better the results, which makes an even better campaign, which then produces more results.  Why is this?  Because reputation matters in email.

Every time an email marketing communication message is sent it builds reputation, either positive or negative.  Over time that perception is built up.  If it’s a positive one the recipient will be more and more likely to view the sender as a credible resource and be more open minded to working with them.   

After a while it’s almost impossible to change the reputation because the audience has a pre-conceived notion of what the email will be and its hard to sway them in another way.  That’s great if you’re offering intelligent valuable emails, but terrible if you’re sending sales message after sales message that’s regarded as spam.

In fact it’s not just your audience that makes this judgement.  ISP’s keep track of your reputation by recipient responses.  Some judge solely on reputation, others might go for a reputation 80%, content 20% split.  Using spam reports and recipient complaints greatly dictates how they handle your email messages.   So not only is your ROI based on the quality of the campaign, so is the deliverability rate.

Obviously this is important to maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing but there is an underlying warning to building a reputation.  Many people decide to dabble in email marketing.  They sign up for a low cost service, use the pre-defined templates, throw a poorly thought out sales message together, and send it out.  When the sales or leads don’t flow in, they do it again.  The patient ones might do this a dozen times before declaring email as a wasted medium.  Unfortunately what they’ve done is make email marketing an even harder avenue for them to take advantage of.  They’ve set a bad precedent and formed a negative reputation.  It now takes even more work to get results from email.

So what hold true for many marketing and communication methods, applies to email as well.  Put some thought and time into what you’re doing before you do it.  Do some research learn what works and what doesn’t.  You can read books, hire consultants, contract it out, go to seminars, listen to tapes, whatever works for you.  The information is there, take advantage of it.  If you don’t you’re bound to make a  spam campaign, form a negative reputation, and make future sales and marketing efforts harder.  Email marketing will build a reputation, make sure it’s a positive one.

There is a tendency in email marketing to obsess about the bad.  Some people look right past opens and click-throughs to the unsubscribe rate.  If they see 10 people unsubscribed they begin to panic thinking that the campaign has lost its effectiveness and it’s time to move in radically different directions.  Always have an idea of what the numbers mean.  10 people from a list of 10,000 means that only .1% unsubscribed.  That’s not something to obsess over.  However 10 from a list of 100, is something to be concerned about.

Avoid the unsubscribe paranoia.  Certainly you should gauge how many unsubscribes and what is unreasonable.  Know what the numbers mean and whether it signifies a problem needs fixed or does the entire campaign need changed.  As a rule of thumb anything over 5% is probably pointing to a major problem.  However, if its 3% but that only happens once, it’s worth evaluating that email, but not pulling the plug on the campaign.  Smaller lists require even more analysis.  Three people from one company makes up 3% if you only email a hundred people but it is really an isolated incident.  Before analyzing any email rate set your goals and acceptable ranges of response.  Do the same for unsubscribes and avoid rushing to judgement that things have gone terribly wrong unless you have some significant data to back that opinion.

The final reason that Direct Mail can be a nice supplement to email marketing is that they lend themselves to separate next steps.  For example, email is great for linking back to your website or a landing page.  That is a little more difficult to do through direct mail as the recipient has to type in the whole address.  Printed material often suffers from email as some people don’t want the extra step of printing.

The point is that you’ll have two options to choose from in deciding what best supports the next step you want recipients to take.  If you limit yourself to just doing email you might be trying to force a circle into a square hole.

Many studies have been done regarding how many times you need to communicate, or touch, prospects before they take action.  In direct mail and email the median number typically comes out between 6 – 10.  That can be a lot of times to interact with prospects without a plan.

Including direct mail with your email allows for a more diverse plan and decreases the risk of prospects tuning out your message.  If a direct mail campaign is abandoned, then everything begins to ride on email.  If the email touches stop, everything stops, and with that ends the opportunity to turn the prospect into a lead or customer.

There can certainly be too much of a good thing in online marketing.  Even the best email campaign can suffer from fatigue if its provided so often to the audience that they tune it out.  Sometimes the most engaged subscriber will only pay attention to a portion of your message.  Direct mail can apply that extra touch in a new way.  Rather than beating the campaign into the audience, it provides a subtle punch.  For those times when you have an event, product, or service that you want to give a quick boost, direct mail to email subscribers can be an unexpected and fresh way to present that item. 

In this case direct mail is the trick up your sleeve that lets you get an extra message to your prospects or clients without badgering them with the same old thing.

This is an aspect that my example did successfully.  They made me proactively opt-in to get email rather than direct mail, however, many people don’t.  In the fervor to cut marketing costs some companies have switched all communications over to email, no exceptions.  I’ll ignore the obvious problem of that not being an opt-in list and go for the subtle one, who said the audience preferred email?

Sometimes email just isn’t right.  I sign up for many email communications but in some cases I prefer direct mail.  An example, my weekly circular ads, sure I can go online and virtually shuffle through sale ads but I like physically having it.  I don’t know why, I just do.  That is the case for many companies, coupons being a notable case.  Some people love getting paper coupons, cutting them out, and filing them away.  Somehow the effect is lost when they have to print them and then cut them out.  For some reason the extra step is perceived as a major inconvenience even if the coupons are easier to find.

The other problem with pulling the rug out on the direct mail recipients is that there are still computer illiterates and functionally illiterate.  Obviously this demographic depends on what the company offers.  Software vendors probably don’t have this problem but many companies do, especially product and service companies that sell to the general public.  Keeping direct mail alive with email campaigns allow companies to keep in touch with their clients that prefer, or need, the paper.

The most confusing benefit of direct mail that gets thrown aside when doing email is when direct mail is working.  Is delivering email cheaper than direct mail?  Of course and it can be a valuable way to cut costs.  However, it needs to be on the prospect’s terms not ours.  If the prospect is happy with the direct mail and you are tracking a gain on it, why stop doing it?

Usually the answer is we can optimize and get the best marketing return possible.  While I love the thought and support the initiative, trying to bump people to email unless they proactively request it is not a one-to-one switch.  Give them an opportunity to get email but don’t stop direct mail unless they want it stopped. Many times people have gotten used to direct mail and don’t have the same response to an email.  In this case we are flushing away engaged prospects.

Track your results and if direct mail is working, keep doing it.  It might not have as high an ROI as an email campaign but if you’re netting a profit from it, keep doing it.  Like anything else, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Email marketing and direct mail need different sets of information for execution.  Name and email address are a minimum for email.  Name and physical address are necessary for mail.  Of course, there is nothing stopping you from including a form on your website asking for addresses, company name, birth date, mother’s maiden name, etc.    However, there should be something stopping you, a desire to get people to actually fill out the form.

Using direct mail with email gives a natural platform to gain valuable information like an address or company name because people know it helps get the mail delivered.  When users don’t understand why someone is asking for information, they typically won’t give it.  When asking for the information seems reasonable and they understand what they are going to receive in return, they will fill out the form.  With the web and email forms, less is more. Meaning the less you ask for, the more people will fill it out.  Direct mail provides a natural extension to gain more information and providing a reasonable reason for needing it.  It also provides an added incentive for prospect’s to provide their valuable information.