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BUSINESSBUILDER NEWSLETTER |
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| December 6, 2003 | |||
Published by Glenn Gordon Contact me at Feedback@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com You are one of 1500+ BBN readers. This list is 100% Optin. If you no longer wish to remain on our list, easy directions are at the very bottom of this mailing. While it is less preferable, you may also reply to this message with an unsubscribe request, or send an email to Unsubscribe@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com
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Hello again. Thanks for joining us! We had a wonderful Thanksgiving but it slowed me down in getting the newsletter ready. I hope you will enjoy it all the more. In this issue:
- News and Comments News and Comments
Scam Warning
Email Marketing
Spam Filters
Mastery TV
The Power of Your Voice
LifeBuilder thoughts for today..... I invite you to send in your most thorny question or problem to be answered in the new section called Answers to your Questions. Send them to Questions@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com Sites of Note Fred Evans offers a hand up but not a handout and invites you to see his new site at www.four11pluss.com Ashvin Ramasawmy invites you to get on the Internet Marketing Superhighway at http://www.emarketingpark.com Where is email marketing headed? Unless you have been on an extended trip to outer space, you are aware that big changes are underway for anyone who in any way pursues email marketing. I’m using that term in the broadest sense, meaning anyone who uses email to expand interest in their product or service and to develop customer relationships. What kind of changes am I talking about? Emails are being deleted in high numbers by spam filters, open and read rates are down, followed by reduced response rates. Internet businesses are failing at an even higher rate than normal, autoresponder suppliers are losing customers at a high rate and are responding by lowering prices or affiliate commissions, or both. This could all be viewed as part of a cycle, perhaps. Somewhat a victim of its own success, email marketing has been proven to be profitable to spammers, who have proliferated to the point where over half of all email is spam. Some of the spammers are legitimate email marketers who went "bad" in frustration at not being able to make it using opt-in mailing methods. The flood of spam has created email filters that block legitimate emails (between 17 and 38%, I am told), and trigger-happy self-appointed email cops why cry spam when they receive a newsletter they forgot they subscribed to. So many spam and potential virus-carrying messages flood the email inbox that every email is viewed with suspicion and may get all get the same "delete key" treatment (only about 40% of the ethical emails are being opened). AOL has such a reputation for refusing legitimate email that many newsletter publishers refuse to accept subscriptions to an AOL address. It has neared the point in the cycle where some changes must be made if it is to survive, although some pundits have already declared it dead. The question is, if email is to survive as a viable marketing tool for Internet businesses, how will it change and what form will it take? Or if it’s really dead for other than personal communications, what will take its place? I’m not a futurist or a prophet, but believe some approaches and developing techniques may give a clue. Here are some possibilities. If email survives… If email is to survive as a useful marketing tool, it is likely that technology will have to change to make that possible, either in the form of a new email protocol, spam laws that are really effective (don’t hold your breath!), or both. What can you do in the meantime? First you need to remember the 80/20 rule, which says that 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers. If you spend your efforts to develop a tighter relationship with that 20%, isn’t it reasonable that your email message would be received much more like a personal email than just another newsletter or sales pitch? What am I suggesting in real world terms? Go beyond niche marketing to "laser marketing." Studies confirm that the closer relationship you have with your reader, the more likely that your email message will have the impact you intended. Segment your subscribers or email list into sub-lists that you can tailor messages and/or products to. You can always include enough information in your message to enable your reader to know what else you do, but you have to have their attention first. You may have to get creative to find out how to separate your lists, but the efforts should pay off handsomely. If it doesn’t, what will replace it? The biggest single factor that I know of is growth in the use of pull technology. By pull I mean the reader goes to get the information he wants when he wants it instead of having it "pushed" to him in the form of emails that he may view as unwanted intrusions. How does that work? Two examples that are already in use are NewsMon and Quikonnex. Although they have significant differences, both operate by means of software placed on the subscriber’s computer. When new content is available, the subscriber is notified by a blinking icon or other non-email message and can retrieve it or go to a website to read it at his or her leisure. Quikonnex uses RSS technology, which stands for Rich Site Summary. RSS bypasses email in delivering a headline-like summary of content, which you can choose to view in its entirety if you like the summary. Even if you never heard of it, RSS is the dominant format for distributing headline content on the Web. The viewing software loaded on your computer is called an RSS Aggregator, which allows you to subscribe to "feeds" or "channels" provided by different Internet publishers. It puts you firmly in control, with no spam or spam filter involved. You can get more information about NewsMon at http://www.newsmon.com/ and about Quikonnex at http://quikonnex.com/278OK, you are saying, that gives me an idea about the subscriber side of these examples of pull technology, how about the publisher side? After all, I’m trying to get information out to hungry readers! For publishers, NewsMon is free, and only requires you to update a simple text file on your server when you publish new information. Frankly, I don’t hear much about NewsMon and suspect it isn’t being highly used. Quikonnex is creating quite a bit of stir because it is RSS-based, and I expect it will see a lot more users sign up. How does it work for publishers? I am not yet using their service as a publisher, so will have to pass on what Quikonnex says. They claim that as a publisher, you manage your information from your web browser without any special software needed, with a full graphic interface. Just login, add your new items, click submit, and instantly all of your subscribers have your message. You will need webspace (but not necessarily your own website) to store the pages you want your readers to see. Integral to Quikonnex is information on the number of subscribers, open rate and click-thru rates. Quikonnex for publishers is $19.95/month. The same address at http://quikonnex.com/278 gives you information about joining as a publisher.Can you use RSS without subscribing to a service like Quikonnex? Yes, but it isn’t the simplest thing to do and probably won’t be for quite a while. To learn more about RSS and what is involved, see http://www.newarchitectmag.com/archives/2000/02/eisenzopf/ or http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/. Also, services like Quikonnex (I’m sure there will be lots more with similar capabilities) add considerably to the basic ability to provide RSS feeds, as you can see when you review their site.It’s time to think about what you will be doing a year from now. I don’t see any short term or even medium term relief from the negative trends that are strangling any sales message you send by email. Think about how you can more tightly target your email weapon, but don’t overlook the ways that pull technology could get your message open and read by more of your target audience. It’s time to act. Glenn Gordon This article contains 1180 words and may be freely reproduced as long as the resource information above is included. If you found the above article helpful or it has triggered some additional thoughts or suggestions, send them to me at Feedback@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com
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Copyright (c) 2003
Glenn Gordon |
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