eMail Marketing – Customer Loyalty
Best practices in email marketing demand communications that go beyond advertising, respect the customer, and speak in a familiar one-on-one style. Email is the most personal advertising medium in history. If your email isn’t personal, it’s broken.
Get Permission
Email is one of the most powerful and yet one of the most dangerous mediums of communications we have. Virtually everyone uses it and in business-to-business marketing everyone you want to reach has access to email. It’s also very inexpensive and it can easily be built into existing marketing systems. But of all media, it is the one where it’s most critical that you have explicit permission.
Without permission you not only risk losing customer goodwill and inviting CAN-SPAM penalties, you could end up blacklisted by ISPs that refuse all mail coming from your domain if spamming complaints have been lodged against you.
Permission is not difficult to get. Offer something of value–a coupon or promise of special discounts, a whitepaper or informational newsletter–in exchange for the customer agreeing to receive your messages and, often, to provide valuable personal information and preferences. Sign-up can be done on a Web site or on paper forms distributed at trade shows and conventions or by traditional mail, resellers, and affiliated organizations in a business network.
TouchStone MarketPoint!
*Seth Godin
