Welcome to the Escape Blog

Great post on E-Consultancy this morning - The decline and fall of email for acquisition.

Any email marketer who thinks that consumers expect and deserve regular, mass email marketing will find their reputation and results flowing rapidly down the toilet.

It’s all about relationships

I’m not sure about you, but I’m in the people business. At the other end of my web pages, or an e-mail that I write, is a person and hopefully they find my stuff good enough to at least skim read it based on some simple questions I bare in mind when generating the content in the first place:

• Will this communication offer them any value?
• Is it even relevant to what they do?
• How well, if at all, do they know me?

Where does e-mail marketing sit in this mix?

E-mail marketing means different things to different people. Earlier this year, we had to change our e-mail marketing service page, for instance, because we kept getting enquiries from people who, basically, wanted to get us to spam strangers for them… and that’s not how we do things… our sales message was wrong.

Email marketing needs strategy. The medium offers you a way to communicate with people very cost-effectively, but, thos people must want to hear from you about stuff that they want to hear about.

Add to that, you have an ever guarded IT department that you have to get past first, mainly down to… you’ve guessed it… spam.

E-mail marketing and trust

It comes back to trust. Yes, you can buy a mailing list, spam it, and you may get some cheap results. But, where is the long term value?

Or, with a well-defined strategy, you could offer people a reason to opt-in to your marketing, send them relevant messages and create a compelling marketing channel for pipeline.