Judging by the number of unrequested e-mails that arrive in my inbox everytime I log on, the world is filled with hustlers trying to sell me everything from cheap drugs to cheap mortgages to highly dubious sex toys. It is an avalanche of garbage, which very quickly gets consigned to the waste bin. I’ve set up e-mail rules to filter some of this out - but still there is a significant amount that creeps through and clogs up my in-basket.
There are the get rich schemes that seem to be originating in Nigeria, where someone has found my esteemed name and would like to give me a million dollars for helping them free up a ridiculous amount of money trapped in some backwater regime.
There are the viruses - at least two a day that my virus scanner does a pretty decent job of catching, and to be safe, I never open an attachment these days without scanning it.
Which brings me back to the starting point - has e-mail lost its way?
Certainly it has become as much of a pain to sort through e-mails as it does having your fax machine clogged up by cheap travel offers, or all of the unsolicited garbage that drops through your mail slot. Personally, I find it even more invasive than the hard copy material - at least with that, someone had to spend money to create flyers and the post office staff are gainfully employed delivering it. Junk e-mail just sets my teeth grating, and when the next poorly spelled missive manages to sneak passed my e-mail rules, the delete key takes significant punishment.
SPAM legislation seemed to have a short run effect with the volumes dropping significantly for a short while, but they seem to be back to the epidemic proportions that pre-dated this legislation.
So is e-mail a legitmate marketing tool any more?
The answer to that is a qualified yes. The statistics still show that e-mail campaigns are cost-effective ways of getting your message out but like any other marketing campaign - you have to be selective and targeted. If you mass e-mail everyone on the planet with a broadcast about your product, then quite frankly you deserve to be locked up in a rubber room with the sounds of Lawrence Welk being played 24 hours a day.
When you create your e-mail campaign, you have to decide who your target audience should be, and craft your message to that audience. The more focussed your target audience is, the higher your chances of getting your message over. Purchasing e-mail lists from on-line sources is not a way to go here. While I’m sure there are some reputable vendors of this information, I certainly haven’t found them.
Our sources are usually taken from information we have gathered from our web-sites. At least that way we know that there is some degree of interest, and we’ll be discussing how you capture that infomation in a later article.
Next - you have to get through the junk filters. The first rule is that you send one e-mail to one person. If you have to buy software to enable you to do this, then go ahead, but the fastest way to kill a program is by sending one e-mail to multiple recipients. I won’t guarantee success with any campaign - but by breaking this rule - I’ll guarantee failure.
The next obstacle is to attract attention, and here is where your subject line comes in. You probably have a total of 40 characters to get your message across and make someone want to open that e-mail. There are two things that you need to do here - firstly you have to identify your organization and the second is to show WIFT (whats in it for them). Short and sweet - once you get the person to open the e-mail you are more than half way home.
We will continue this later
