Low budget? No problem!

Article from February, 10th, 2004

E-mail marketing still remains relatively inexpensive. This may change soon, if major players make a decision to stamp all e-mails. You can read more about it here: http://www.clickz.com/mkt/sense/article.php/3309661

But even if this does not happen, the trend is clear - e-mail marketing is slowly but steadily becoming more and more expensive. Why? Because people are becoming less and less tolerant to this type of marketing.

They just delete most messages without reading them. This is true even for newsletters that people signed up for. The only way to combat the trend is to provide quality content, improve targeting and switch to permission-based marketing model. All of these things can get quite expensive. Does it mean, it can't be done with a low budget? Not true.

1. Cheap quality content.
There are multiple ways to get quality content for little or no cost. The first way is to get your subscribers to contribute their articles, tips, advice and insights. This works great, if your subscribers are professionals who work in the same or related industry. Then, your subscribers will be able to provide you with well-written pieces that have original thoughts worth reading. But the content does not necessarily have to be original. A number of websites offer their own content that you can publish as long as you indicate the website it was originally published at.

2. Targeting
Your subscribers, once again, are your best helpers. One can only wonder why so few e-mail marketers ask their recipients to forward their messages to friends and colleagues who may be interested in the subject. Really, it is just common sense. Medical professionals, for example, frequently discuss medications and treatment methods among themselves. Peer advice is considered to be unbiased, hence deserving trust. Try to apply this method to your e-mail messages. Simply add a short line "If you know a colleague who does not receive this newsletter but may be interested in this information,
please forward this e-mail to him or her." Better yet, create a "Tell a friend" form on your website. Do reward your subscribers who spread the news about your products or services.

3. Permission-based marketing
Permission-based marketing, it seems, has to be much more expensive by definition. Buying a CD with millions of e-mails for twenty bucks or harvesting e-mails on the Internet with special software is the low cost solutions you've always dreamed of, right? Wrong! While permission-based marketing is definitely much more difficult (you have to create attractive content), in the long run it is cheaper, not to mention much more effective. First, you get a narrower, better targeted audience. Hence, your advertising costs go down. Second, you don't spend efforts and resources (money, once again)
marketing to people who are not interested in your products at all. Finally, these subscribers tend to be more loyal. And its long been known that it is much cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one.

 

Relevant links:

    • Email harvesting
    • Post-harvesting e-mail validation program


Next week: Battling short attention span of Internet surfers
Prev week: Branding the message

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