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Lessons Learned About Email Marketing It’s official – my book, The Email Marketing Kit: The Ultimate Email Marketer’s Bible, is available for purchase. I wrote it to help companies learn to do more effective email marketing; but along the way, I learned a few things about email too. Here’s a short list. Terminology Terminology was one of the first things I had to address. In the email world, permission-based, opt-in and other words have a meaning that is understood; outside it, they don’t. Being forced to define these terms and, in some cases, find other ways to say them, was a useful exercise for me. It will help me better explain email marketing and what I do to non-marketers in the future. Which leads me to you. When was the last time you tried to express what your company does or the benefits of your product without using your industry’s lingo? While your core market may totally understand the terminology, there may be additional markets you’re missing because they don’t. Finding a way to speak to them, be it in email, on your Website or offline in your direct mail, may be a growth strategy worth considering for your company. Strategy It was difficult because of the terminology issue addressed above. But it was also challenging for me in another way. The best way I can describe it is with an analogy: it was like trying to teach someone to ride a bike with the printed word. Give me a bike and someone who doesn’t know how to ride it and I can, with some time, teach them how. But try writing a chapter explaining to someone how to ride a bike. It’s a lot harder; for me it was harder because I was working in the hypothetical rather than in the factual. I had to try to cover every possible contingency that might arise. I ended up creating pieces of a sample email strategy to illustrate my points and I think it came out pretty well. But it also gave me new insight into why so many email marketers don’t have an overarching email strategy: they don’t know where to begin. One reason they don’t know where to begin is that many books on email marketing don’t talk about strategy; they are purely tactical. I found this out as I scoured my bookshelf, looking for examples of good chapters on email marketing strategy. I didn’t find one. I did find a number of general business books that did a good job on explaining how to develop a strategy. Bottom line: if you don’t have an email strategy, get one. If you don’t where to start, try my book or any general business book. But don’t try to go it without; it’s too important a component to omit. Copyright Getting copyright permissions took a bit of work; I ended up with a few different categories of response:
No one I contacted turned me down because of the content of the screenshot or the copy about it (but then again, I tend to be constructive rather than critical even when I critique). While this task was still daunting, it made me realize that not getting permission to use a copyrighted image was a bit silly. Most people are willing (as long as you don’t trash them). If you’re not getting permission to use copyrighted images, I recommend you start. It’s not difficult and it is the right thing to do. Complexity This is partly true because email is always evolving. The book was pretty much finished before I wrote my ClickZ article on Snippets, so that’s not in there (second edition addition, I guess). The editors and I also didn’t want to overwhelm the reader; while I do go beyond just the “basics,” I would not call this a graduate level course in email marketing. But it’s a great read for someone just starting out or for people looking to boost the performance (sales, revenue, leads generated, etc.) of their existing program. I went more in-depth in areas key to meeting business goals like strategy, optimizing creating and tracking and reporting. Areas you should put more effort into if you’re looking to improve your email marketing results. Conclusion Until Next
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