The Truth about Email Marketing – Acquisition Campaigns

The Truth about Email Marketing – Acquisition Campaigns  As an Independent Marketing Consultant, I pride myself on knowing and learning about industries I service and represent. I have been in the data business for close to 15 years and have seen a shift from traditional direct mail to eMarketing and Social Media advertising. A good database is always at the center of a successful direct marketing campaign, and that is even truer for an email campaign. As a marketer, I have always asked myself “if it is important or interesting to me, is it really spam?” The answer a lot of the time is ‘yes’ and oddly enough in the age of spam, I wouldn’t report or even unsubscribe some of the communications I receive.  Spam regulations occurred for people who abuse the system, and email marketing, the right way, is more difficult because the email list used for a campaign is better qualified… Here is email marketing the legitimate, non-Spam way, with a reputable data provider We, together with you, find the best target audience We email that audience asking them to opt into receiving email from your company They respond Yes or No. If yes, they will receive the email; if no or no response, we will exclude the email address. You only pay for the names that are able to receive the campaign. There might be a small fee or run charge on the full list You provide creative unless you would like our deployment department to create the email from scratch Email is deployed by the vendor and they provide reports on the deployment and responses After the vendor explains the process, they often hear: “Well that seems like a long process and we want to send out the email on our own.  We can get 100,000 email addresses for $500 so we will buy the names and email ourselves.” The result: Some sort of black listing usually follows this up from your Internet service provider. You also find a lot of unhappy people, not to mention the huge number of bounces because the names are not what we call “legitimate” or deliverable. Of course the worst case scenario for this company is action by the Federal Trade Commission based on regulation defined in the CAN-SPAM act. The reasoning for the process outlined above It might seem excessive to go through the process outlined above and it is for a reason.  Anyone can send an email and it is practically free. In order to keep companies from emailing everyone all the time for products and services they aren’t interested in, spam regulations were put into place.  The benefit of working with a vendor is that they help pre-qualify the leads by priming them to receive your communication and for that nominal fee mentioned; they filter out those that don’t want to hear from you. If you look at the return on investment of a real eMarketing campaign vs. emailing names you buy from “some company” you will see why doing things the right way pays off.  The example above is strictly for purchasing names you don’t already know. Email campaigns to existing customers that allow you to communicate with them via email are different. We can help with that process and I promise to give my opinion in a blog to come.