In 2006, according to the DMA, every dollar spent creating and sending an e-mail with a promotional offer generated $57.25 in return. By 2009, that ROI had fallen to $43.62. But that’s still twice the amount earned from search-based advertising. (By way of comparison, the ROI of traditional, mailed catalogs was estimated at just $7.32.)
The reason spammers continue to send out billions of e-mails every year is that even their irritating, scattergun approach delivers profits. E-mail advertising works, and it works better than any other form of marketing on the Web.
Spam, though, has frightened people off. According to the DMA, marketers spent $600 million on e-mail advertising in 2009. That’s just a fraction of the $11.2 billion spent on search advertising, even though it delivered only half the KaChing for the buck. That means that marketers who know how to practice e-mail marketing, who understand how to do it in a way that delivers information about quality products to people who have chosen to receive that information, can make the most of a massive opportunity.
Proper e-mail marketing isn’t difficult to do. Even the law provides a bit of help.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 threatens fines of $11,000 for each unsolicited e-mail delivered to each recipient. Considering the number of recipients in each spam campaign, that should be a hefty threat. Officials have occasionally handed out the odd giant fine, collecting piles of cash and confiscating Porsches from unlucky spam artists. But most spammers feel—for good reason—that they’re never going to be caught, so they keep sending out the messages. The act might not be very helpful at keeping out spammers, but it does provide useful guidelines that everyone marketing through e-mail should understand and follow. You can think of them as rules for good e-mail business, and they cover three areas:
1. Unsubscribe compliance. Every marketing e-mail you send has to have a way for recipients to pull themselves off your list, and those requests have to be honored within 10 days. Usually that just means an e-mail link at the bottom of your message marked “unsubscribe.”
2. Content compliance. “From” lines and subject lines have to be relevant, and you have to include your physical address, not just your e-mail address, in the message.
3. Sending behavior compliance. This requirement is designed to clamp down on the most deceptive behavior. It prohibits sending e-mail through open relays to harvested e-mail addresses and using a false header. Those are the kinds of things that only a real spammer would do and they don’t affect legitimate e-mail marketers.
These requirements are the minimum, and there are no restrictions against e-mailing existing customers or people who have inquired about your products. CAN-SPAM calls these “relationship” messages, and they’re perfectly legitimate.
In practice, legitimate e-mail marketers go further than CAN-SPAM’s rules. They use “double opt-in” lists. Subscribers have to click a button declaring that they agree to receive marketing messages from you. They then receive a confirmation e-mail that they have to click again before their e-mail address is added to the list.
That makes it impossible for someone to add someone else’s e-mail address to a list maliciously, and it also makes it impossible for anyone to say that they shouldn’t be on the list. If that sounds like you’re putting a pile of hurdles in front of people you’d like to be marketing to, understand that it’s a practice that benefits marketers as much as recipients. It ensures that the e-mail addresses on your list are functional and accurate, and it reduces the bounce rate when you send out your messages. You don’t need to be a programming genius to use this system, either. Mass mailing services often provide free scripts to their customers. SendBlaster (www.sendblaster.com), for example, supplies a simple PHP script that you can upload to your server and explains in five steps how to use it (Figure 5.5). It’s very simple, and most decent mass-mailing systems supply a toolbox for their clients to use. They want to make your e-mail marketing easy so that you’ll become a subscriber. It’s a good deal.
Of course, you still have to build your list, but part of your Internet business strategy should consist of picking up e-mail addresses whenever possible. You’re going to be handing out lots of free samples, reports, and white papers to bring people to your web site and spread your name around the Web. The price for those should always be an e-mail address that allows you to send them information about products they might want to buy in the future.
Figure 5.5SendBlaster helps you build a double opt-in system in seconds.
Thousands of people are going to flow through your web site every month. You want to make sure that they’re leaving with a hook that enables you to pull them back at a later date.
When you’re signing them up, you’ll also have an opportunity to push other products in their direction. If someone has shown enough interest in the information you’re providing to give you their e-mail address, then some of them will be interested in other free information, too. People who sign up for the free copy of my AdSense Secrets e-book, for example, have to leave their e-mail address. They’re then taken to a “thank you” page that advises them to check their spam filters for their confirmation message. The bottom half of the page is an advertisement for a free trial of my Top One Report newsletter.
Enough people sign up for that report to more than cover the cost of the free books that I’m handing out.
In effect, I’m using an information product to grow my e-mail list,
