The Most Important Lesson On Internet Marketing You Will Ever Read

It is almost insulting to say that marketing is about two fundamental things - attracting the customer to your business, and keeping the customer attracted to your business once you have them.

The internet provides unparalleled power to do both of these. Maintaining a customer relationship via the internet is both effective and cost effective - provided you do it right. This power also comes with its risks - it is incredibly easy to do the wrong thing and destroy a customer relationship forever.

While no reputable business person would even consider sending unsolicited bulk email (spam) to people they don't even know, it is worth mentioning here that spamming can result in severe damage to your reputation, and can result in your connection to the internet being severed. Doing so is a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy of almost all ISPs, as well as being a breach of the Internet Industry Association Code of Practice.

When you move to internet marketing from a traditional marketing background, the first thing you need to do is "unlearn what you have learned". You need to be able to forget everything you know about customers and their response to marketing approaches, because the internet is a new medium, with attributes vastly differing to traditional marketing methods. If you think of electronic mail as "just like postal mail", or "just like a telephone call", you will be setting yourself up for a costly and spectacular failure.

On the internet, your customers will expect to have complete control of their online experience - and if you even look like you're not going to give it to them, it's easy for them to find another vendor. Quite literally, the more control you give to your customers and your prospects, the longer you will keep them.

Think of it this way - would you rather have your customers complaining when they do get your promotional material, or when they don't get your promotional material? The difference between these is how much control you give to your customers.

If you send any kind of bulk email to customers who haven't asked for it, you can expect to lose 33% of them right off the bat - that's how much customers hate to receive unsolicited bulk email. On the other hand, if you give them a genuine, up-front choice, you can expect 90% of them to request the material.

Taking this approach also gives you a significant competitive advantage. Suppose you assume that your customer wants your promotional material, and send it to them without asking. Now suppose your competitor has asked that customer if they want to receive their marketing material, and the customer has actively responded "Yes". Whose message do you think the customer will open first? Whose do you think is more likely to be deleted without being read? Psychologically, people will treat the same thing very differently if they know they have asked for it.

Your email list should be "opt-in" only.

Opt-in (permission) email marketing is where recipients have chosen to receive email from a sender. ie. they have given you permission to contact them.

You may also come across "double opt-in". This is where the user signs up for your messages and then receives an email asking them to confirm their interest by responding to that email. If they do not respond, they are not added to the list. Although this sounds great in theory, you can lose up to 60% of your subscribers by using this method of sign-up!

Opt-out email marketing is where recipients are automatically added to a mailing list unless they have specifically requested not to be added (ie. they have opted-out). Although your list will probably be larger, your response rate will be significantly lower.

Always make your customers feel in control.

A customer who is in control will be more comfortable doing business with you, and is far more likely to actually say "Yes" to your mailings. In fact, when given a choice like this, empirical evidence shows that around 90% of people answer "yes" to all announcements.

People who do answer "yes" are almost guaranteed to become repeat customers, and that's good news by any standards.

Links:

Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email (Australia)
http://www.caube.org.au

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (USA)
http://www.cauce.org

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (Europe)
http://www.euro.cauce.org

Next section: Top email mistakes

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