OnYourMark, LLC Blog

This month‘s Pro is Keith Klein, President of OnYourMark, LLC and author of WebForging - A practical guide to the art of forging your web presence. The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 6 - Hosting.

Direct email campaigns are undoubtedly the most cost-effective directed form of marketing to anyone, anywhere, ever.

Because it is so powerful and so cheap, direct email marketing is seriously overused for UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email, aka Spam.

Permission Marketing, often called “Opt-In Marketing” is the use of direct email marketing with the permission of the recipient.

Permission marketing is fantastic (and would be much more so if email weren’t so terribly abused by spammers). After all, people are giving you permission - indeed, requesting - that you put your message on their desktop, and that you do so on a regular basis.

To accomplish this, to gain permission to put your message on the desktops of scores, hundreds, even thousands and tens of thousands of people, you have to have something to offer them besides commercials.

Your permission-based direct email campaign should have regular features that are useful to your audience. These might include:

• White papers, technical articles, application bulletins and other “how-to” information, including tutorials and demos
• Notice of material changes and additions to your web presence
• Endorsements by professional associations, underwriting laboratories and the like
• Surveys to get input from the audience
• New Product Bulletins
• Notices of Events
• Case studies
• For sales channels, highlight successful sales techniques and awards and buyer case histories showing the success of customers who’ve purchased…and offer ways to combine forces with your channels
• Deals, your best deals
• Images and collateral materials, including literature and price sheets
• Limited time offers, including free samples
• Offer free advice, analysis, testing, etc.
• Relate industry news that impacts the audience, provide resource links for follow-up
• Personnel announcements and recognition, particularly for staff that support the audience you’re reaching out to
• Contests
• Newsworthy notes on your company’s and staffs’ participation in professional, community and humanitarian service projects
• Humor, in good taste, is always a good draw

All of the above should be brief, say headlines and one- to three-line synopses, with the possible exception of a “feature article.” The goal is to present worthwhile information to maintain the interest of the audience, and to generate traffic back to your site where complete information exists.

Keep an archive of your newsletters on your website. You benefit by expanding site content, showing potential subscribers what they can expect and by giving search engines more content to index to bring searchers to your site.

Hopefully without making this sound like a commercial, we’ll continue our discussion of direct marketing techniques using email while noting the capabilities of eSponse, www.eSponse.com, an online tool for such campaigns. We have a strategic partnership with eSponse. We’ll illustrate here some of the features and benefits of eSponse and similar email-based direct marketing programs.

Links Mentioned in this Article:

- www.diaryland.com
- www.livejournal.com
- www.blogger.com
- www.thebubbler.com/modules.php?name=Journal

Next month: Keith discusses what to look for in email marketing software.

What would you like to ask the pro? Email your questions to askthepro@OnYourMark.com!