Since I wrote about how to develop a powerful email marketing strategy, I have heard from dozens of people who have indicated that they see serious threats to existence of email marketing as an effective tool for a long time. They are all convinced that RSS/XML feeds will definitely become the preferred tools within months (for savvy web users) and within 12-18 months among all users, particularly with the push by Yahoo to incorporate RSS feeds in the My Yahoo page.
My attention was also drawn to a study by Arial Software and here are some of the best practices in email marketing identified by them (I have only included those that are not mentioned in the iProceed list):
My attention was also drawn to a study by Arial Software and here are some of the best practices in email marketing identified by them (I have only included those that are not mentioned in the iProceed list):
- Double-confirm subscription request (simply because crooks were using other people's address and getting them subscribed, though we wonder, why).
- Unsubscribe mechanism should actually work (we had emphasized this but what Arial found in its study was that not all companies have a fully functional system in place).
- Do not share email addresses with spammers (can you imagine a company doing that but some companies did not do enough due diligence prior to sharing their email lists with "their carefully selected email marketing partners").
- Send at least one email (apparently some companies collect email addresses but then never write to their subscribers). While we do not see any problem with that (except that some subscribers might actually forget that they signed up if you never write to them, and then if you do write to them, they will hit the "This is Spam" button), in Arial's opinion, it is probably a good idea to at least occasionally communicate with your customers.