Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

What’s Wrong with Email?

By Colin DelanyFounder and Editor, E.politicsBlog: http://www.epolitics.com

What’s wrong with email? Let’s look at some of its intrinsic weaknesses and some ways you may be tripping yourself up (problems that you can avoid, if you’re careful).

• Email is intrusive. Yes, email is intrusive, which is both a strength and a weakness. Intrusiveness is a strength in that your messages demand attention from the recipient, but it’s a weakness because a constant barrage of emails in the inbox can be very annoying. As I’ll discuss next, you need to make sure that your list members WANT to receive your messages. “Delete” is a very easy button to push. Because of email’s in-your-face nature, the effects of small mistakes can be greatly magnified.

• Legitimate email can be confused with spam. Spam is the enemy of everyone who uses email as a communications tool, for business, for politics, or just to keep in touch with family and friends. At many companies and organizations, more than 95 percent of the messages hitting the email server are spam. Even with the best filtering software, this volume of garbage can manage to gum up the works.

  As an email marketer, spam can stop you in your tracks in two ways. First, spam filters seem to take a fiendish delight in diverting email newsletters. The characteristics of legitimate email newsletters and marketing offers are very close to their unauthorized cousins, and spam-blocking software is always going to have trouble telling the ...