NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> e-mail marketing the right way
ONLINE-ADS>> e-mail marketing the right way
Andy Rebele (ahr_at_cityauction.com)
Thu, 14 Aug 1997 18:56:55 -0700
There has been some discussion about the ethics of marketing via
e-mail, with Mark Welch kicking it off with his Boycott Barnes &
Noble campaign (featured in today's San Francisco Chronicle). I
wanted to give my two cents and to provide some results of a
campaign I conducted in what I thought was an ethical way (at
the risk of incurring the wrath of another boycott!).
In the offline world, there have been various legal challenges
to telemarketing, the closest analogy I can find to e-mail
marketing. In the end, it became illegal to use a machine to
call people and give them a sales pitch and illegal to send junk
faxes. However, it is still legal for human beings to call you
at home to market to you, and it is legal to fill your mailbox
with unsolicited paper mail.
Why the difference? My guess: economics. It should cost the
marketer about the same amount of human time to deliver a
message to you as it takes you to read it. It is abusive of
your prospective customers' time to find a way to intrude with
your message in a way that costs you nothing and costs them time
to evaluate and discard.
The analogy to the online world is that if you send someone junk
mail using CyberBomber or FloodGate or any other auto-spammers,
you are violating not only the time of your prospective
customers but probably a future law (as soon as the law catches
up to the medium). However, if someone (a human not a script)
reads your web page, newsgroup posting, or other public
statement, and finds from the content that you are a likely
interested party, and then sends you a personalized note, that
is probably okay. Floodgate is like junk faxes and automatic
telemarketing machines, while a human being sending you a
personalized note is more like traditional telemarketing.
E-mail marketing done the right way can have fantastic results.
My web site is called CityAuction, a person to person auction
classified ad site. The challenge was to create awareness and
reach critical mass quickly, and there was no easy way to do it.
Using banners or other passive means would send a lot of people
looking at an empty classified ad space - not very interesting,
no matter how good the underlying technology or theory is.
Therefore I decided to use a highly targeted e-mail campaign to
recruit visitors and sellers.
Over several weeks I read various newsgroups and web sites where
the charter is person to person sales. I read every post, and
put relevant posts into a database with the real name, e-mail
address, and other information from the content of the post. At
the end of that period, when the site was ready, I sent out
about 3,500 e-mails to these people, each with a personalized
note (mail merged, but prepared by a human being). It had taken
me 2-3 weeks of full time work to read each post and to
determine which people were legitimate prospects for my site and
which were not. Suffice it to say it was very time consuming.
The results over five days (with no search engine support):
3,500 e-mails
100 listings of things to sell (2.8%)
1,000 unique visitors (29%)
35 remove requests+flames (1%)
Because we had just launched and it was our only initial
technique, I can be reasonably sure that these results came
directly from the e-mail campaign.
My conclusion? E-mail marketing DONE RIGHT can be a very
effective technique, and one to which far more people react
positively than negatively. It takes a lot of time, but for a
site which needs a kick-start it may be the most cost-effective
way to go.
(It's a shame so many people do it wrong. Without them I'm sure
doing it right would be even more effective.)
Andy Rebele
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CityAuction - http://www.CityAuction.com
Local and National Auction Classified Ads
Buying and Selling without the hassle
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This week's Online Advertising Discussion List sponsor:
Want Your Advertiser's Message in Front of the RIGHT Audience?
SelectCast For Ad Servers 2.0***The Most Effective Way to Target Ads
>>>>>>> http://www.aptex.com/select.htm <<<<<<<
-----------
LinkExchange introduces new targeting across its network. For the first
time, any advertiser can target niche audiences from 1,600 site
categories. Visit LinkExchange at http://www.linkexchange.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Online Advertising Discussion List To Unsubscribe send UNSUBSCRIBE
http://www.o-a.com/ to online-ads-request_at_o-a.com
