 |
Email Marketing is Dying
I'm sure there are a lot of people that are going to hiss, piss and moan at this post because how dare I challenge the prevailing orthodox of marketing that has been going on for decades. Well, eat me. I'm going to challenge the method, not the philosophy behind it. From day one when I started to get into internet marketing, one of the most common things I heard was build a list. I would go to the Warrior Forum and they'd tell me that I need to build a list. The philosophy behind this is correct. Normal affiliate marketing will have people visiting your site, clicking your link and that's the end of your relationship. All business thrives on return business. Most businesses from golf courses to magazines collect a customers information, so they can contact them in the future. Email marketing has really been the tested and true way to do this online. I agree, it used to be the best way to do this in like the 90's and just as much as a few years ago. The issue is spam. The issue comes from people that send lots of emails that they have no business sending them to. When you capture emails by offering someone a free ebook or report, than you have permission. It really doesn't matter because people are sick of spam and they're sick of getting emails. 1. 95% of all email sent isn't read There are a lot of emails being sent. There are millions going out every single hour of every single day. 95% of them will never be read. It shows you that most just go into the spam folder, most are immediately deleted by simply seeing the subject. 2. Lack of control One thing I hate doing is putting my business control in the hands of someone else. It's the main reason I don't like Adsense. Basically, you have to use a service like Aweber or GetResponse or even your own server one like phplist. Those services will always work, but the real question is control. Tomorrow Congress could change the laws on sending mass emails. It could change everything. I know this may not seem like something possible, but as an Adult Webmaster, I know how politicians can destroy a business. You're ultimately at the mercy of spam filters of local ISPs. I'm talking about local ISP spam filters. These filters block email and a user will never ever see them. It's not like they show up in the spam folder on their account, it's gone. It's blocked permanently and they do this sort of thing all the time. Operating your business at the mercy of others doesn't seem like much of a business. 3. People are busy I've signed up to people's lists before and it just gets tiring. They send you these long ass emails and most of them will never contain a grain of substance. I'm not saying that substance would make a difference in this case, but I'm a busy guy. Most of the emails I got were deleted the second I got them. Sometimes a subject would make me open it, but I wouldn't read past the first sentence because it was so damn long.
The Ways That Work TodayI've beaten up on email marketing, so what is a person to do? What is the right way of doing it today. Well, there are a lot methods to do this and many people are doing it now, but just don't recognize it. 1. Blog/RSS - This really isn't much different than email marketing, except they don't necessarily get bugged by an email. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you're going to know when a new blog post is made. Like email marketing you have to provide something of value to keep people subscribed. It's completely identical to email marketing. Instead of having a list that you can email to when you want, you have an RSS/Bookmark/Daily Visitors that you can blog at each day. 2. Web 2.0 / Social Groups - This works the same way. You have to build up a list of niche related contacts on twitter, digg, facebook, etc. Your twittering, dugg pages, etc all have to be interesting enough for people to put up with you and you can always work some sort of selling into it. 3. Your Own Forum - This is a little harder to get working, but it gives you a lot of power. Not only do you have a long list of targeted niche related contacts that you can email, they also visit your site on a daily basis and post. They actually build up the content of your site. You can release new products to them, you can get user opinions on making a product, etc. You have a lot of power with a forum, it's just much harder to build. And this is how joint ventures will work. Instead of having someone emailing 10,000 email contacts, people are tweeting(or is it twiting, I don't know), bloggers are blogging about the product, diggers are digging and forum owners are advertising. This was bit of long post, but I think it gets the point across. Build contact lists of your potential customers, but forget about email marketing. Move in 2009. Whoever is promoting the idea of email marketing to you is probably stock in old thinking or they're trying to make an affiliate sale when you sign up at Aweber. Related Posts
Viewer Email: How You Did It? March 15 2009 |
Affiliate Marketing Xpert was created for people that want to live the Four Hour Workweek lifestyle.
Categories
|
|
|
|