Scott Hardigree, Indiemark LLC

Note: This post is NOT written for list owners. It’s written for advertisers that rent emails lists or advertise in email newsletters. If you’re an advertiser who has, or is planning, to include 3rd-party email into your marketing mix it will help to use the channel more successfully and get a better ROI, with smaller budgets. In the end, it will help list owners, too. After all a happy advertiser is a repeat advertiser.

Throughout my years in email marketing both on the agency an… Continue

I had an epiphany recently that I’d like to share with you:

I cannot think of email marketing as its own entity–but rather as part of the entire customer experience.
Email can’t be put in a vacuum.

The idea of the vacuum, or silo thinking, with any marketing medium is very dangerous. And of course, naturally, it’s easy to separate each medium into silos:

* On TV and radio, I’ll deliver this message. This will handled by my ad agency.
* In direct mail, I’ll deliver that message. This will also… Continue

You might find our most recent blog post of particular interest, it's titled Get Your Email On .

It's written by Brian Massey a noted columnist and author. Brian goes as far to say "If you don’t have your email marketing efforts nailed, you have no business investing in social marketing.".

1. If email was a country, its 1.4 billion users would make it the largest in the world. Bigger than China, bigger than the populations of the USA and European Union combined.

2. 247 billion emails are sent each day. That’s one email every 0.00000035 seconds.

3. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, some 20 million emails entered cyberspace.

4. Every second, the world’s email users produce messages equivalent in size to over 16,000 copies of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (assumi… Continue

Are your email subscribers clicking through to your websites, ordering your products, or registering for your events as expected? No? Instead are they simply unresponsive, unsubscribing or (gasp) complaining? If so, perhaps you’re not clearly establishing mutual expectations.

So how do you manage the high expectations of your subscribers and then compel them to act?

1. Tell your subscriber EXACTLY what you expect of them.
2. Tell your subscriber EXACTLY what they can expect of you.
3. Do EXACT… Continue