One sale in a million!

Astonishngly that's the expected success rate of the average spam email.

But consider that you might easily be sending out 80-100 million emails every day, then one sale in a million might make commercial sense.

Knowing that doesn't stop it being intensely annoying to be the recipient though!

One person's interesting newsletter is another person's spam!

Like me you've probably got some sort of spam filter installed on your system.  Whilst it does help, by trying to group together all of the emails that it thinks are spam, I still need to go look at them a few times every day just to check that a wanted email hasn't accidently triggerd a quarantine response from the filter.

To speed things up, I can let my filter know specific email addresses that I'm happy to receive email from regardless of whether their content looks a bit 'spammy' or not.  This is called the 'white list'.

I hope that you are as sparing with inclusion on your white list as I am with mine.  Only those that I really trust get to go on my white list.

However, I'm still left with the drudgery of checking all of the spam every now and then.  As you can imagine I'm not always very diligent and occasionaly tend to 'just delete the whole damn lot' ... along with a few 'valid' emails.

I suspect that I'm fairly typical of many users - some of whom will be your target customers and prospects.  And that 'valid' email that I accidently deleted along with the spam was probably your newsletter announcing a brand new product or service ... about which I'll never know?

Use email with consideration

Getting my overt permission to sending me periodic email newsletters is one way to over come this.  I'll then add your address to my white list because I've decided that I value your information.

However, I might be happy to allow you send me the email, but I'm not convinced that you warrant inclusion on my prized white list ... yet.  That leaves your email in the spam quarantine area with the risk of being caught up in a lazy bulk delete.

All is not lost ... careful thought about how the email is presented and what goes in it can reverse the situation and accelarate you onto my white list. 

There are many experts around who can help you with this.  But one simple tactic that I recommend to clients is to deconstruct multi-subject newsletters into very simple, short, text only emails that provide a small list of teaser headlines that are hyperlinked to the full articles hosted on your website.

This way the email is less lilkely to be quarantined by the spam filter (no graphics to make it suspicious) and the receiving target customer will appreciate, that being short and clear, the decision to unquarantine or discard is very easy. And should they want to read an article it's just a mouse-click away.

After time you might get your just reward and make it onto their white list.  But don't get complacent.  Remember that the one sure way to get targets to read your emails is to make them consistently interesting, relevant and timely.  There's no short cut for excellence in marketing communications.

Memorable marketing

Thinking and working pragmatically like this will help you to make your marketing work better for you in a more memorable way. This means that your target customers will be able to differentiate your products and services from those of your competitors and clearly see the value in buying from you.

If you would like some advice on memorable marketing techniques for your own business, or you know someone at another business who might need help, then please contact us. The sooner you start, the sooner you will benefit.

You Talkin' To Me? (Update)

Download this update to last month's handy guide which explained some of the latest thinking on how to get the best from your marketing in order to improve business effectiveness.

Written by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as part of their Shape The Agenda series, this document makes easy reading for business people of all experience levels.

Marketing Effectiveness Assessment

A free service to small businesses in the Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire area, the Marketing Effectiveness Assessment delivers a professional audit of how a business is using the tools of marketing to communicate to existing and potential customers. It also includes a series of simple and cost-effective marketing activities that the business can implement immediately and at low cost.

Download the factsheet now.

Useful Links ...

Adduce Marketing

Chartered Institute of Marketing

Marketing UK (information portal)