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I often talk about content and how you can create articles to attract relevant search traffic. Of course, there is no reason why it can’t be focussed towards your existing clients.

I had a meeting with a potential new client last week who is doing this already. I liked her approach.

Basically, she goes to existing client sites and spends half a day discussing the issues they have around what her company supply, in this case IT network services. It is market specific, in this case it was regarding the network security issues in schools.

She then takes the feedback and writes white papers focusing on the problems, putting in time to do research and creating solutions.

This is then utilised as e-mail marketing material to existing clients.

It takes time but the point is that it is content that answers a problem, one of the first rules of advertising.

If you create HTML e-mails, you may be interested in this easy to understand chart displaying various e-mail clients and the CSS they support.

Courtesy of our favourite e-mail software company - Campaign Monitor

I mentioned earlier today about our spam problem. Then I read this article over at E-Consultancy.

The DMA’s latest stats show that delivery rates fell to 68% for acquisition emails and 80% for retention emails in the period, continuing the drops seen in Q1

Which begs the question, when is a marketing e-mail not spam?

• As a user, I seem to receive e-mails despite not opting in - it’s annoying.
• As a marketer; with some campaigns I send, some users, despite having opted in, still put in a spam complaint.

My personal opinion is that people are lazy. They’ll take the easy option despite any consequences, to which, they will lazily reply later, and that includes (on the user side) not un-ticking a subscribe box, and from a marketers side, adding people to lists without consent.

Of course, you could say that all marketing e-mail could be taken as spam, because most people don’t understand permission and opt-in. They also can’t remember every list they’ve subscribed to or who and when they may have given out their e-mail address.

As we become more and more protective of our e-mail addresses, can we, and will we, forgive the e-mail marketers who do it right, or see them all as spammers like all the rest?

As the firewalls and spam filters get tougher and tougher, and people continue to use random Hotmail accounts to subscribe, the result is a marketing medium that becomes less effective.

That’s why I like the idea of double opt-in e-mail and I think it may be coming to an inbox near you in the next few years.

Double opt-in is where you both agree to accept e-mails from one another up front, hence, subscribing to each others communications.

It’s a bit like when you make friends with people in Facebook and leaves you with control. In fact, between me and you, I think Facebook groups and messaging could be a new avenue to be exploring now…

In our seminars about e-mail marketing I have quoted very high figures from Spamhaus about the percentages of actual e-mail versus spam.

This week, we implemented an e-mail filtering service and it turns out already, we have eliminated our 91% of e-mail spam - ouch.

I came across a few articles I thought I’d share:

Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies. Design is not just about making things look pretty.

Optimising Your E-Mail Subscription Process from Campaign Monitor.

Secret Strategies Behind Successful Viral Campaigns. Or, how the viral aspect is injected into the web.

Personally, looking at some of the habits of my friends [even], I am not suprised that the way we are communicating is changing.

News (via BT Blog) from Hitwise, citing that the use of social networks has overtaken online e-mail for the first time last month.

Age does play a part, with older users still preferring e-mail. But, with the ease of use, and an almost centralising of communication that platforms such as Facebook bring, it makes sense to connect (at least on a personal level) using social networking tools rather than using mutiple single purpose tools such as e-mail.

From Freshview - our favourite e-mail software company, comes this presentation about the future of e-mail design (and marketing).

And a quote from the notes that I will be using in my next few meetings:

Email isn’t dead, it’s just a bit fat.

There is much talk at the moment about e-mail formats for e-shots. If you are in the game creating them, the different ways e-mail clients read e-mails makes the job very difficult to create a standard.

Dave at Campaign Monitor, our e-mail tool of choice, has a call-to-arms regarding e-mail standards.

I for one am considering changing our e-mail newsletters to pure text, with more links to articles and the blog. At the moment, as you can see, 30% of the e-newsletters we sent in September were opened as HTML. A high percentage of the unopened ones must get read as text, otherwise surely people would unsubscribe? Out of those 339, only five people looked at the HTML version link on the website.

What Do You Think?

E-Consultancy has a small article about declining e-marketing read rates. The article indicates that it is the way people read your e-mails rather than whether they do or not, which is having the impact, with many people choosing to not show images in HTML (the key to measuring read rates).

Many people are shocked when I first show them what can actually be measured with an e-mail campaign where the HTML versions are being read. That said, the situation is the same as with web statistics. They are purely there to guide you to make a better e-shot - testing and adapting the way that you send them. (more…)

A surefire way of getting on someones nerves (especially mine) is to keep trying to sell (or market) to them when they don’t want to be sold (or marketed) to.

Bleedin’ common sense, isn’t it.

So, when I get an e-shot (again) from a company I (a) don’t want; and (b) have already unsubscribed from, it ticks me off.
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