Chapter Twenty-Three

The Big Email Marketing Challenge

By Ben Hart

The challenge is that most people have at most a circle of 16 people whose emails they will regularly open and read.  Emails from all others are usually deleted the second they arrive.  Most people just don’t have the time to read email from anyone outside the “Circle of 16.”

Hitting the delete key is the reflex action created by the arrival of an email, unless the email is from a member of the “Circle of 16.” 

Your challenge as an email marketer is to crack into the “Circle of 16” of your prospects and customers.  That requires your emails to be fascinating and immensely valuable to those receiving your email.

Your Email Marketing System

We are not going to spend much time here on the mechanics of e-mail marketing. But you need to know that there are two kinds basic categories email marketing systems.

There’s the kind that comes in a box that you run off your own desktop and your own server.

A number of Internet marketing pros like this approach because they have complete control over their email marketing program.

The other kind of email marketing system is one that is hosted somewhere else.

The way this usually works is you pay a monthly fee based on how many opt-in susbcribers you have on your email list and on how many emails you are sending out each month.

90 percent of us should be using a hosted email broadcast service – such as  ConstantContact.com, iContact.com or Aweber.com

This is by far the easiest and safest way to go.  I use Aweber and iContact.com.

ConstantContact.com is a little cheaper than iContact.com and is the most widely used email marketing service.  Aweber.com is cheaper still.

I use Aweber for my prospecting program  -- emails to those who are on my opt-in list, but who have never bought from me.  I use iContact.com for my buyers.

The reason I do this is because of one annoying  problem with Aweber.

Aweber requires a double-opt-in for anyone you add manually to your list – including people who have bought from you.  So if your buyers do not confirm that they want to get emails from you, Aweber won’t let me email to them . . . even though they have bought from me!

The reality is, 25%-30% won’t confirm that they want to hear from you – even if many of them do.  They just miss the confirmation email or forget.  Or a spam-blocking program torpedoed my “Subscription Verification” message.  And Aweber won’t allow you to ask more than once if they want to hear from you.  So that’s not good.

That’s why I use two services – iContact.com for my buyers, Aweber.com for my leads.

There are also some very pricey Cadillac-style email marketing services, designed for the larger businesses that have some pretty amazing features and tracking capabilities.

As with everything in life, you basically get what you pay for.

When I combine Aweber.com and iContact.com I get most of what I need for a good price.

There are many reasons why I like the hosted third-party email marketing service beyond the fact that they are easy to use.

First, providing email marketing service is what they do in life.  That’s how they make their living.  That’s their specialty.

Contracting out this technical job frees you up to do what you do best.

You don’t want to be spending hours a day figuring out how to use your desktop email marketing software, with its limited technical support. If you run into a problem, you’ll end up calling someone in India.

I believe in contracting out all functions that are not part of your core business.  Make the third-party hosted service responsible for making the system work.

But even more importantly, I am convinced that you will have a much higher rate of delivery of your email messages if you use a reputable third-party email marketing service.

Why?

Because that’s their business.  The email marketing service will be out of business quickly if the emails of their clients are not delivered at a high rate.

Remember, the anti-spam filters are becoming increasingly vigilant.

AOL and Yahoo, especially, are on an all-out crusade against spam. 

Stomping out real spam is certainly a good thing.  But legitimate marketers who are offering valuable information and services are being unfairly lumped in with the spammers and scammers.  And we’re getting hurt badly.

Here are just a few eyebrow-raising episodes reported by industry publications and the news media:

o   "AOL's spam filters blocked nearly 100 notices that Harvard University had emailed to applicants telling them whether they had been accepted or not."  Washington Post

o   "AT&T Broadband, a major technology company itself, had a similar experience. It offered customers in Seattle a spam filter, but the technology snagged messages sent from AT&T, including one email message alerting customers to a rate increase."   eWeek

(So AT&T’s spam filter blocked its own emails as spam.  Geniuses!)

o   "In the most basic terms, the problem of spam is that costs and benefits are misaligned: Spammers send messages almost cost-free and gain some return from very low response rates; the recipients, both mail services and the ultimate individual, bear the costs, both in money for filtering services and in user time and annoyance. Somehow, we must redress that balance."    Esther Dyson, Release 1.0

o   "Despite very real delivery problems, 84% of marketers fail to take basic precautions. Depending on which study you trust, the false positive rate [the “this is spam” tag] is 17-19% to consumers and can reach as high as 50% to the corporate workplace (Company IT heads are infamous for relying on content-based filters and third party blacklists, which produce extremely high false positive rates)."           Email Marketing Metrics Guide 2005, Marketing Sherpa

AOL, Yahoo and the big ISP’s think their job is to protect us from our email.  They think we are too stupid to do this ourselves – for example, by hitting the “unsubscribe” link that must, by law, come with every marketing email.

The result is we are not getting the emails we want to receive. Even emails from our friends and relatives are ending up in the spam folder, or are not getting to us at all -- in any form.

It’s like having a phone service or cable TV that works only 75% of the time.

There is a strong (unhealthy) anti-business, anti-commerce ethos at AOL, Yahoo and among Internet Service Providers generally.

The partial solution to this problem for most of us is to use a well-established hosted email marketing service as your advocate with the ISPs (i.e. AOL and Yahoo).  If you use a third-party hosted service, I believe you have a better chance of having your emails delivered than if you “go-it alone” against the big ISPs and the spam filters.

These large hosted email marketing services are in constant contact with AOL, Yahoo and the ISPs, working to make sure the emails that originate from their servers are cleared – that they get through.  That’s their business.

This is essential, because if your emails are not delivered, your business is dead on the Internet.

So, for all these reasons, I believe in using a hosted email marketing system – at least for 90 percent of us.  Though I certainly know a number of expert Internet marketers who send out their emails themselves.

Some people are “do-it-yourself” kinds of folks.  They make apple pies from scratch.  They make their own clothes. They build the house they live in. 

Some like to do mechanical work on their cars – engine rebuilds and the like.

I’m not one of those people.

I’m a writer and a marketer, not a techie.

I prefer to contract out something as important as email marketing to a hosted email marketing service that is operated by experts on email broadcast and delivery . . . so I can be freed up to focus on what I do – and that’s create powerful marketing messages and programs.

The hosted email marketing services do a good job of walking you through the mechanics of how to do it.  They store your list or lists of names on a data base.  They allow you to segment your list and create many lists and subsets of lists.

They give you the forms that you need to have on your site that captures the names, email addresses and other contact information of those who fill out your form.

It’s all automated.  They walk you through how to do it.  It’s very easy.

So no need to spend any more time on that here.

Let’s get to the important stuff. And that’s your email marketing strategy – including the content of your emails and the purpose of your email marketing.

Unfortunately, we still need to spend some more time here on delivery of your emails.

A major part of email marketing strategy must focus on delivery – even before you get to the content and purpose of your email marketing program.

Email delivery is the #1 concern of email marketers.  And the problem of email delivery will likely only increase as time goes on.

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