Email promotion is a totally valid promotional media, and in some companies has even eclipsed the use of direct mail. This may seem like a bold statement to some, but consider some of the facts regarding email promotion:
1. The response rates currently are typically higher for email than direct mail.
2. The only costs for email are for the list rental (business to business lists range from 20 to 40 cents per name; business to consumer lists range from 5 to 20 cents per name), and for creating your email (copywriting, design), so the overall costs are usually much less.
3. The response to email promotion is much faster than direct mail. With direct mail, you will start getting responses within 1-2 weeks, depending on whether you send first class or bulk mail, and the biggest bulk of your responses will come in 3-5 weeks later. With email, you will usually get 80% of your responses within 48 hours.
4. The number of highly targeted email lists available has mushroomed in the last two years. There are now millions and millions of names available of various highly targeted publics. Although there are still more specialized direct mail lists than email lists available, the email lists are closing fast.
Things to Keep in Mind with Email
A. Test, test, test
One of the biggest keys to success in email promotion is to come up with multiple emails, each with different subject lines, different offers, and different creative themes, and test them out on a small number of names (I recommend 1,000 to 2,000 each).
The purpose here is to find a version of your promotion that works well and gets acceptable response, before you send it out to large numbers or to your whole list.
The reason for this should be obvious, but I have certainly learned this the hard way. We have all come up with promotional pieces or campaigns that we thought were the greatest piece or campaign ever, only to find them going down in flames, with little or no response. So what if you had sent that out to a very large list and used your whole budget to do it? Not much return on investment there. So the mantra is test, test, test, multiple versions and always in small quantities until one or more of your emails get good response.
B. Which Items Do You Use to Test?
The items you want to use to test are 1) the list, 2) the offer, and 3) the creative. That comes from the great minds of direct response marketing, such as Bob Stone, the author of Successful Direct Marketing Methods. Most of the ample tech in the field of direct mail applies equally well to the email promotion field.
There is one very important item to test, which is not mentioned in traditional books on direct marketing, which is the subject line of the email. Changes in the subject line can dramatically change your response levels.
You should test several different email lists, always in small quantities. Then take the one that got the best response and send to that whole list.
Your offer is also a very important item to test in your email campaign. There are "hard" offers (buy now, special discount if you buy now), and "soft" offers (respond now and get a free gift, respond now and get entered in a contest), and everything in between.
A "hard" offer is where you are trying to get the public to buy your product now. A "soft" offer is more often used in lead generation, and usually offers something for free to generate interest. The most successful soft offers involve offering something that is directly related to your product or the general subject matter of your product.
With email, it's very effective if you can create some kind of soft offer where you are giving away some sort of electronic information product. That way, you can set up an autoresponder to automatically send your white paper or free report or whatever out to the person as soon as you receive their email.
C. Don't Do Spam
Spam is defined as unsolicited commercial email. In other words, someone is sending out email to people who have not requested that type of information or given their permission to receive that type of email.
There's been quite a lot of negative commotion about spam over the last few years, mostly by a small group of people. I personally think the commotion has mostly been overblown.
BUT, I think you will find that if you do send out spam, let's say to a list from one of these CDs with millions of names, you will find that you will generate a lot of trouble for yourself, much more trouble than benefit.
And as you develop an in-house list of your own, be responsible with people who ask to be off your list. In other words, take those people off! I think responsible treatment of remove requests is one of the things that separates the professional email marketer from the amateur, and failing to do so gives the whole field a bad name.
