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Shall I Compare CNNMoney.com to a Summer’s Day: MarketingExperiments team sends virtual Valentines

February 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“Loooovin’ you, is easy because you’re marketable….la la la la la la la laaaa.”

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and love is in the air all throughout the MarketingExperiments lab. In honor of this well-marketed holiday, we sent a few virtual Valentines to our favorite advertising and marketing industry news sources.

Cuddle up with your favorite blog and watch the love flow…

Now here’s a little recap (for some link love)…

  • Research Analyst, Adam Lapp, made like Pepé Le Pew with Vandelay Design Blog
  • Yours truly got all weak in the knees about AdBusters
  • Director of Marketing, Pamela Markey, said “You had me at click here” to Creativity
  • Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, Andy Mott, composed a sonnet about CNNMoney
  • Senior Manager of Research and Strategy, Boris Grinkot, was our irrepressible Don Juan who refused to be locked into just one site…but he did confess to cruising Twitter in search of something appealing
  • While we couldn’t drag our director, Austin McCraw, in front of the camera, the man behind the magic told us that his muse was Smashing Magazine

Nothing is harder than confessing to a (possibly) unrequited love. Now that we’ve walked the line, we want to hear from you.

What advertising or marketing industry news source do you really love? What blog or website just completes you? Send us your virtual Valentine via email, LinkedIn or as a comment to this post. We’ll publish our favorites in a future post right here on the blog…so be creative.

Shall I Compare CNNMoney.com to a Summer’s Day: MarketingExperiments team sends virtual Valentines

Filed Under: Advertising, General, Internet Marketing News, Marketing, Online Marketing Tagged With:

C’est un Blog: Why appealing to an international audience is no joke

February 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When we asked for your 2010 Internet marketing predictions, you told us that local is going to be huge this year. And I wholeheartedly agree. I can’t wait for the day I can simply search for a product on one site and find the best price of an in-stock item at a small business or major chain store near me.

But in our fervor for the new opportunities cropping up at a micro level in our own hometown, let’s not overlook the macro possibilities. So today I’d like to take our focus off of local and discuss, well, the entire world.

After all, you are reading the MarketingExperiments Blog International Edition. Sounds fancy, and I loved seeing the International Edition of American publications when I was in Montréal (très chic!). But, of course, everything on the Internet is essentially an International Edition. After all, our readers include Stephanie from Canada, Meraj from Singapore, Inna from Germany, Gabriela from Argentina, and Gavin from the UK.

How well do you know your audience? For Americans at least, sometimes I worry we have a view of the world similar to Saul Steinberg’s famous cover for The New Yorker. But let’s not forget that this is the World Wide Web. Your customers are, or at least have the potential to come from, anywhere in the world.

So here are some thoughts to consider and ideas to test when appealing to an international audience:

2731067095 73f8f62020 b 300x211 C’est un Blog: Why appealing to an international audience is no jokeWhere in the world?

Now that the world is your oyster, where should you begin? Most analytics software, such as Google Analytics, will break down your traffic by country of origin (and drill down even deeper than that). Understanding where your current audience comes from can help you shape your message.

But don’t just limit yourself to where your audience is coming from today, consider where they could be coming from and think about how you can target content to that potential audience. In addition, if you have an ecommerce or even lead generation site, look at how your traffic compares to actual orders and leads. If you get a big chunk of traffic from a certain nation, yet they very rarely order or become a lead, what in your conversion process is stopping them?

Understand when it pays to habla Español

While you don’t necessarily need an entire website for every possible language, it is always a good idea to delve into proper segmentation of your current and possible audience. And if you find a big enough potential market, that commonality of language may significantly help your conversion rate.
You don’t even necessarily need to look beyond your borders to find that opportunity. For example, according to the U.S. Census, the buying power of Americans of Hispanic origin is projected to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2014. If that segment could generate a significant amount of business for you, you should probably consider testing custom Spanish-language landing pages to see if they are worth the investment.

Shalom means hello…and goodbye

If you do choose to test custom foreign-language pages, keep the word custom in mind. Don’t just settle for poor translations of your current pages, but truly put the time and investment into understanding that segment and its motivations…as you would with any other segment.

Marketing history is littered with funny (and costly) cross-cultural blunders – such as the introduction of the Chevy Nova in Central and South America. It doesn’t take a major blunder. Even simple bad translations can turn away potential customers. I probably would not shop in the “Exciting Dressy Fashion zone” or want to eat “Desktop bacteria rice.”

It’s easy to laugh at these snafus, but if we do not truly understand the cultures of global and bilingual markets we seek to enter, we may be making these same mistakes. We can’t be transparent marketers if our audience doesn’t understand what we’re talking about. And far from welcoming new customers, we may be turning them off to our message.

You can still spreek het English…

While custom foreign-language landing pages are worth testing if the segmentation is right for your organization, don’t feel like you necessarily need to invest resources to customize your site for every possible language. As French is la langue de l’amour, English is currently the international language of business and the Web (after all, ICANN is still an American organization).

Also, services like Google Translate and Babel Fish enable your non-English-speaking visitors to instantly translate your page into almost any language for free. So here are a few other ideas to test in your native language…

Ciao bello world!

As I said above, there is an entire world out there. Just make a right at the Atlantic or a left at the Pacific and you’ll likely find untapped markets. So acknowledge it…as I did in the intro to this post when I mentioned our readers from across the globe or as Boris Grinkot did in a recent post where he simply mentioned regulations to consider in India.

The first step to profiting from an international audience is recognizing that you have one. Test how often to mention different cultures and which cultures to mention and see how that affects your traffic.

6,809 ways to say “customer service”

Even better than acknowledging the existence of other cultures, show them that you truly cater to their needs. If you’re looking for some good examples, Israeli websites tend cater to a global audience well (a combination of state subsidies that makes international shipping cheap and the global interest of a nation that holds importance to three major religions).

One good example from that country is TheGreatShofar.com. This site clearly illustrates how it serves other parts of the world by, for example, having an American phone number and a testimonial from someone in America right on its homepage (leading us to believe that either America is one of its most important, sought after segments or this is a landing page optimized for Americans).

Also, the site clearly spells out in its FAQ that it ships around the world:

I live in Timbuktu.  Will you ship to me?

Yes.  We ship to Timbuktu as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China and pretty much anywhere that has a postal service.

To find out how much it will cost to ship to your location, just add your desired products to the shopping cart and our shipping estimator will display your shipping costs.

One way we try to cater to our international audience is through live training and speaking engagements around the world. Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will next be teaching and speaking about email response optimization at Email Marketing Germany 2010 in Munich from March 8-9, 2010. Register (in English) today. Or, if you prefer, register (in German) today.

C’est un Blog: Why appealing to an international audience is no joke

Filed Under: General, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing, Online Marketing Tagged With:

Test Your Marketing Intuition: Pier 1 Imports email design

January 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

How much will companies spend on email marketing this year? According to Forrester, that number is well over one billion dollars. And still email designs are being sent out without any clue as to how well they perform. It is not uncommon to see the “most beautiful” email messages that follow all the “best-practice” guidelines and have a committee of “design experts” backing them underperform – as if spending more than a billion dollars wasn’t enough!

So we want to see if you can tell the difference. We ran an experiment with three top-of-the-line agency-designed email messages. We want to know if you can spot the email design that performed best. (A prize for all the winners this time)

Background: This email test ran for Pier 1 Imports, which I will assume most of you know is a large B2C company selling home products. This email in particular was a seasonal promotion going to a segment of their house list. There are three agency-designed email messages (Treatments 1-3) being tested against Pier 1’s baseline version (Control).

Test Design: This was a simple A/B/C/D multi-factorial test. While we also measured open rate and conversion rate, the objective was to increase the clickthrough rate. Here are the page versions (click to zoom in):

Control                                              Treatment 1

c Test Your Marketing Intuition: Pier 1 Imports email design t1 Test Your Marketing Intuition: Pier 1 Imports email design

Treatment 2                                      Treatment 3

t2 Test Your Marketing Intuition: Pier 1 Imports email design t3 Test Your Marketing Intuition: Pier 1 Imports email design

Results: So now that you understand the experiment background and have seen the treatments, can you spot which email performed the best? Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as a world-renowned marketing leader!

1. Which email generated the highest clickthrough?

  • Control
  • Treatment 1
  • Treatment 2
  • Treatment 3

UPDATE: Surprise! The Control was the winner. Each of the agency-designed treatments underperformed the original (one of which decreased clickthrough by 52%). Congratulations to Ben, the only correct response we received before we announced the results on yesterday’s web clinic. You can follow Ben on twitter at @findingforrest. Also, subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer, the results of the control and treatments, and how these experiments can help you shape your own marketing campaigns.

Test Your Marketing Intuition: Pier 1 Imports email design

Filed Under: Email Marketing, General, Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , , , ,

Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How changing the first seven seconds of user experience drove a 201% gain

January 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” While some experts have dutifully penned entire tomes about this subject, the famous advice Franklin Roosevelt gave to his son about public speaking still resonates today for its stark honesty.

If Franklin Roosevelt 2.0 was giving advice about Internet marketing, he would probably change “brief” to “clear” (and perhaps “seated” to “testing”). While marketers invest the majority of their time and budgets on complex areas deeper down in the funnel, MarketingExperiments research has found that most of the gain from optimizing a website occurs in clarifying the first seven seconds of users’ experience.

Much of the complex analysis and formulaic methodologies used by our scientists to create optimized pages with triple-digit conversion improvements can be summed up in this truism…

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

The first seven seconds, and perhaps just those first three, are vital to clearly guiding your visitor into an inevitable conclusion to engage in a transaction with you. Below is a quick excerpt from a recent live web clinic in which Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS (our parent organization), discusses how your visitors interact with your website in those first few moments they land on your page…

Yet Difficulty Trumps Clarity?

Of course, so many websites produced by experienced, professional marketers don’t follow this simple principle because, in reality, it can be quite difficult to truly be clear. Put another way, what is clear to an insider (a marketer that lives, breathes, and eats his product every day) can be meaningless and confusing to your visitor. And even when you have every intention to be clear, how many monkeywrenches get thrown your way (Sales wants one thing, Operations another, and don’t even get me started on Legal)?

To help you on your journey along the road to clarity and prosperity, you can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, Maximizing your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain, will be taught on January 13th from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.

Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How changing the first seven seconds of user experience drove a 201% gain

Filed Under: General, Landing Page, Marketing, Marketing Insights, Online Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How changing the first seven seconds of user experience drove a 201% gain

January 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” While some experts have dutifully penned entire tomes about this subject, the famous advice Franklin Roosevelt gave to his son about public speaking still resonates today for its stark honesty.

If Franklin Roosevelt 2.0 was giving advice about Internet marketing, he would probably change “brief” to “clear” (and perhaps “seated” to “testing”). While marketers invest the majority of their time and budgets on complex areas deeper down in the funnel, MarketingExperiments research has found that most of the gain from optimizing a website occurs in clarifying the first seven seconds of users’ experience.

Much of the complex analysis and formulaic methodologies used by our scientists to create optimized pages with triple-digit conversion improvements can be summed up in this truism…

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

The first seven seconds, and perhaps just those first three, are vital to clearly guiding your visitor into an inevitable conclusion to engage in a transaction with you. Below is a quick excerpt from a recent live web clinic in which Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS (our parent organization), discusses how your visitors interact with your website in those first few moments they land on your page…

Yet Difficulty Trumps Clarity?

Of course, so many websites produced by experienced, professional marketers don’t follow this simple principle because, in reality, it can be quite difficult to truly be clear. Put another way, what is clear to an insider (a marketer that lives, breathes, and eats his product every day) can be meaningless and confusing to your visitor. And even when you have every intention to be clear, how many monkeywrenches get thrown your way (Sales wants one thing, Operations another, and don’t even get me started on Legal)?

To help you on your journey along the road to clarity and prosperity, you can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, Maximizing your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain, will be taught on January 13th from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.

Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How changing the first seven seconds of user experience drove a 201% gain

Filed Under: General, Landing Page, Marketing, Marketing Insights, Online Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Social Media Marketing: Use data and metrics to transition from wallflower to life of the party

January 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

In middle school, I was fairly cerebral. OK, some would say nerdy. And while that mindset certainly paid off in the classroom, it didn’t help much at the middle school dance. My younger self would have delighted at being able to read a book that held the secrets to being the life of the party. I even tried exploring my trusty encyclopedia set (remember those) for an answer.

3278650279 eb724efb44 246x300 Social Media Marketing: Use data and metrics to transition from wallflower to life of the partyI share the awkwardness of my formative years because I believe that when it comes to social media, most experienced marketers are little more than brace-faced thirteen-year-olds staring at Twitter and Facebook like a poster of New Kids on the Block – you know deep-down a perfect marriage exists but just don’t know how to make it happen.

So I was delighted to hear that our sister company, MarketingSherpa, is close to releasing its second Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report. The subtitle, “Data and Insights for Mapping an Effective Social Marketing Strategy,” highlights what has largely been missing from the social media discussion over the past few years – real substance.

By combating the ample hype with an ROI-based strategy, I hope this benchmark study can guide marketers in the transition from, as Senior Analyst Sergio Balegno puts it, “novice to competent practitioner capable of achieving social marketing objectives and proving ROI.” And Sergio and his team hope to provide the guidance to get you there. As he says, “To make this leap, marketers will need benchmark data to help them better understand what works (and what doesn’t) in social media marketing, and a practical method for mapping a strategy that will lead them to social marketing success.”

MarketingSherpa let me have an early, pre-publication peak at their data and share one of my favorite insights with you on the blog today. The 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report has 188 charts and tables, and the one below really caught my eye…

smmbs 480 Social Media Marketing: Use data and metrics to transition from wallflower to life of the party[click to enlarge]

The most effective tactic shown in the chart above – blogger relations – is used by far fewer organizations than less effective tactics primarily because of the effort required. At first glance, I thought the lesson from this chart is to start amping up blogger relations immediately.

But, as always with social media, hopping on the first thing one sees is the easy (and least effective) approach. And that’s what this chart is really showing. Too often, marketers focus on fast and easy ways to make use of social media instead of leveraging the most effective ways. Since social media is essentially free, why bother if something requires too much effort? Of course, in reality, social media is not free. You must invest a significant amount of time to do it right.

According to the Benchmark Report, “This focus on ‘fast and easy’ versus effectiveness is a problem that is far more prevalent with organizations in the trial phase of social marketing maturity than with more advanced social marketers working from a strategic social marketing plan.”

You see, in the end the most profitable approach to this new medium isn’t so new after all. Be strategic. Twitter is a tactic, not a strategy. And the real perfect marriage occurs when you pair proven marketing principles from your overall plan with social media tactics that make sense in your overall strategy.

You probably intrinsically know that this is the right thing to do, but I hope this little reminder helps you stay focused on what really works for your company as you execute on your 2010 plan. As for marrying the cute one from New Kids on the Block…I’ve got no advice to help you there.

Social Media Marketing: Use data and metrics to transition from wallflower to life of the party

Filed Under: General, Marketing, Marketing Insights, Online Marketing, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

Test Your Marketer’s Intuition: Landing Pages (Contest)

December 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

On a webpage, the visitor experience begins and ends with the slightest movement of a finger. Potential customers can terminate our existence in a matter of seconds when first arriving to our website. Getting a new visitor to not only stick around for more than seven seconds, but to actually take an action can be like ice skating up hill.

But this is nothing new for most of our blog readers out there, and today we would like to test your marketing intuition on a landing page experiment we recently ran with one of our research partners (and like last time there will be a prize).

Background: The company we were working with provides end-to-end market solutions for small- and medium-size businesses. As you will see in the pages below they offer access to mailing lists and leads. The page we tested received most of its traffic from PPC ad campaigns using more “generic” search terms. Its primary objective is to generate as many form completions (or leads) as possible.

Test Design: This was a simple A/B/C/D multi-factorial test focused on strengthening the communication of the value proposition. Here are the page versions (click to zoom in):

Control:                                                   Treatment 1:

info control1 223x300 Test Your Marketer’s Intuition: Landing Pages (Contest) info treatment 235x300 Test Your Marketer’s Intuition: Landing Pages (Contest)

Treatment 2:                                             Treatment 3:

treatment2 240x300 Test Your Marketer’s Intuition: Landing Pages (Contest)treatment3 243x300 Test Your Marketer’s Intuition: Landing Pages (Contest)

Results: So now that you understand the experiment background and have seen the treatments, can you spot which page performed the best? Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition (one person’s intuition will get them a chance to have their own landing page optimized live by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin on today’s web clinic – normally priceless).

1. Which page generated the most form completions?

  • A. Control
  • B. Treatment 1
  • C. Treatment 2
  • D. Treatment 3

UPDATE: Treatment 1 (option B) was the winner. It performed 201% better than the control. Congratulations to Flavio from Q-11.de, the only correct response we received. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer, the results of the other treatments, and how these experiment can help you shape your own marketing campaigns.

Test Your Marketer’s Intuition: Landing Pages (Contest)

Filed Under: General, Landing Page, Optimization Tagged With: , ,

Web Clinic Extra: Optimize your Email in Three Steps

December 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

During our December 2 web clinic, Optimize your Email in Three Steps, Boris Grinkot, Heather Andruk, and Corey Trent answered questions from our audience about email relevance, frequency, and metrics.

We often don’t have time to answer all of our audience questions on the live web clinics. So we distilled all the questions into a few representative queries, and pulled Heath Andruk and Corey Trent in from the lab to share their insights on the latest edition of Web Clinic Extra:



get flash player Web Clinic Extra: Optimize your Email in Three Steps


Corey and Heather answered these questions:

Question 1 (1:05): In the frequency experiment shown on the clinic, was there variation in the types of emails (i.e. reminders, offers) in the low frequency email group (i.e. 1-4 per month) like there were in the higher frequency group?

Question 2 (1:45): What are some factors to determine good segments?

Question 3 (2:40): What do you do if you cannot segment?

Question 4 (5:00): Is there one age group more tolerable to frequent emails than others?

Question 5 (6:40): How do you figure out the best timing for emails?

Question 6 (9:55): Can you track goal pages that are outside of your domain with Google Analytics?

Question 7 (10:55): Can you track an email campaign in Google Analytics if you are sending emails with a 3rd party provider?

Come back to the blog on Friday for a technical addendum from Corey Trent. He has some specific tips to help you put his metrics wizardry into revenue-generating practice for your email campaigns.

The complete Flash version of the web clinic, along with a downloadable research brief (PDF), are now available on MarketingExperiments.com. If you have additional questions, use the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Web Clinic Extra: Optimize your Email in Three Steps

Filed Under: Email Marketing, General, Marketing, Marketing Q&A, Online Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , , , , ,

Test Your Marketer’s Gut: Email frequency contest

December 2, 2009 By 1 Comment

Sending more than 1.2 billion emails per year is a significant marketing investment. And for one of our Research Partners, this effort raised several questions:

  • When will their list get irritated?
  • How many emails should be sent on a regular basis?
  • At what point do emails start hurting sales?

To ensure they were getting the most value from their marketing spend, our Research Partner wanted definitive, data-driven answers. So we tested for the optimal frequency that will maximize total revenue. While our scientists now have the benefit of reams of information and know the answer to these questions, we thought it would be a fun challenge to your “marketer’s gut” to test your acumen and see if you could spot a winner based on sheer intuition (and yes, there is a prize).

Background: The Research Partner is a large ecommerce company that sells well-known, inexpensive, perishable products online (if we told you any more we’d have to kill you). They had a massive, yet varying email send rate and was emailing the house list anywhere from once a week to four times a week. Most of the Research Partner’s strategy was based on the offers available at the time. With such variance in frequency, we wondered if sending more email messages would have overly negative effects on unsubscribe rates. And likewise, we wondered how much impact sending fewer emails would have on revenue. Ultimately, we were looking for that optimal email-sending sweet spot.

Test Design: We took a small, highly-motivated segment of the Research Partner’s house list and used it as our testing sample. We then split that list into seven segments that would receive different send frequencies as represented below:

    Segment 1: 1X PER MONTH
    Segment 2: 2X PER MONTH
    Segment 3: 3X PER MONTH
    Segment 4: 4X PER MONTH
    Segment 5: 6X PER MONTH
    Segment 6: 10X PER MONTH
    Segment 7: 15X PER MONTH

We monitored the effect of the send frequencies for 60 days. We tracked delivery, open rates, click-through, conversion, revenue, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates throughout the duration test.

email sends graph Test Your Marketer’s Gut: Email frequency contestResults: Testing for optimal frequency assumes that revenue and unsubscribes will increase at a steady rate until the list gets irritated. At that point, revenue will experience diminishing returns and even decrease. Likewise, unsubscribe rates will increase at that point of irritation.

We wanted to test the validity of this assumption, as well as discover the optimal email frequency for this company’s email list that increased both total revenue and lifetime value of the customer.

But before we reveal the results from our scientists’ brains, we want to test your “marketing gut” with the following question (Oh, and just to spice things up a little, one person’s intuition will get them a free seat in one of our online certification courses – normally $595.):

  1. What is the optimal monthly send frequency for this company?
    1. 1-2 per month
    2. 3-5 per month
    3. 6-9 per month
    4. 10-15 per month

Congratulations to Sharon Mostyn, winner of the Email Frequency Contest, and one of only a handful of correct responses. Sharon chose the Landing Page Optimization Course as her prize. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer along with a full analysis of how this discovery can help you shape your email campaigns.

To enter the contest, leave your choice as a comment to this blog post along with your email address or Twitter handle (make sure you’re following @MktgExperiments so we can reach you). We will select a winner randomly from the correct responses (and yes there is a correct answer). The winner and results for this test will be announced live on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Test Your Marketer’s Gut: Email frequency contest

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing, ECommerce, Email Marketing, General, Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why Internet Marketing Just WORKS

November 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment

When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

While there are many more aspects to internet marketing than just permission-based email marketing, email has definitely been the cornerstone on which our business is built.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , ,
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