Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

“Do Your Customers Feel Stalked?” - Holly Buchanan on the collection of email addresses.

“Email blasts” - Do you want to be on the receiving end of such a thing? No? Me neither. We hate junk mail. We hang up on cold callers. We avoid obnoxious people. Yet, many of us turn right around and somehow think sending email to somebody - that didn’t ask for it or we’ve never met - is a whiz-bang marketing idea. (And, there is lots of “expert advice” and consultant bloviating about how to get around spam filters. Ouch.)

Here in the quirky burque, email marketing is a “new” idea for most businesses. Out in the greater Web and biz world, it’s very old stuff.
[Side Tip: Different tactics for different locations and markets. What works in Albuquerque won’t work in L.A. and vice versa. “No tech” customers probably don’t even read their emails more than once a month. Web-savvy customers are blogging, podcasting, and subscribing to RSS feeds in addition to digging, twittering and flickring. They’re not going to get all hot and bothered about another boilerplate “free” sales pitch eletter; in fact, they’ve got multiple email accounts, including at least one for junk that they’ll give you if they suspect you’re going to send them - um - junk.]

Just because you have the address, doesn’t mean you should use it. If you’re thinking about doing email marketing, here are six tips. (Don’t feel badly if you’ve already gone awry on any of these - “experts” and huge, supposedly savvy companies routinely send out totally cold ka-ka. I abused my poor contacts and clients too back in the earlier days of emarketing.)

1. Commenters on your blog neither want nor expect to be added to your “special offers” list. They are abiding by your blog’s requirements. (And, please, stop sending me emails offering to add me to your terrific link farm online resource. If I don’t know you, chances are I don’t want my link on your site.)

2. An email on a business card is useless if you didn’t make some sort of personal connection at the time you asked for it. Use the phone number instead and make a “get to know you” date (and, don’t try to sell something right then.) ‘nuf said.

3. Asking for emails “in case there is a problem with your order” should ONLY be used for that purpose. Throw some cool stuff into the package when you ship it and I’ll be much more likely to take you up on the special offer (if it’s truly special and not a goofball, sleazeball fineprint wonder.)

4. Don’t offer “customized” email bulletins that aren’t. This should be obvious, but, duh, I can’t use discounted airfare from, say, Dallas to London. I live in Albuquerque. (Pretty much any travel site I’ve ever used is guilty of this one.)

5. Don’t assume because we talked at a meeting that I want to receive your eletters. If we didn’t discuss it then, I don’t want it now.

6. Don’t assume that because I have contact info on my site I want to receive cold email (no matter how much you stroke my blogger’s ego). Even if it makes it past my multi-level spam filters, if I don’t know you, it’s almost certain I’ll delete it unopened, regardless of the subject line/headline.

Comes down to: Connection. Permission. Relevance.

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Read More: And then there are those email surveys…read John Whiteside’s Not the most social emai survey. (As John notes, “Fortunately for Microsoft, there are so few Zune users that the damage should be minimal.” Ouch.)

Related Posts:
What a choice. Pot or Email?
“Everyone” Knows (Not)
Write Like Lincoln
“I’ll Pretend I Didn’t Know.”

Tags: email, email marketing, marketing troubleshooting