Some Email Marketing Myths

Email marketing is cheap

Email marketing is not Direct Mail Online. You cannot therefore simply apply DM principles, deduct the print and postage costs and expect similar results. DM costs anything from £0.50 per send to several pounds. Email marketing costs are very much cheaper for the creations and send than DM. however, just as much effort needs to be given to the message, design, content, response handling and fulfilment.

The message therefore is: Email marketing is cheaper to send than DM - that is all.

Email marketing is quick

Sending 5000 email on our ultra-fast T1 Internet connection will take less than an hour. All too often this results in the rest of the campaign being rushed and ill-considered. The time saved by virtue of the email media should be used productively to make the content more powerful and compelling. Not only is the send much faster than DM, the responses can be almost instantaneous, this is a huge benefit in many ways, a whole campaign from send to fulfilment can be completed in 72 hours, compare this with an average DM campaign. One aspect of this instant result is that your respondents expect the same from you, if you fail to meet this "instant gratification" expectation you should have stuck to DM.

The message here is: Email marketing is fast - but do not rush the preparation.

Email marketing is easy

Anyone who has ever carried out an email campaign of any size will know that awesome feeling when you give the go-ahead to send, it is a moment filled with expectation, excitement, and DREAD. What if:

Every one of my recipients is exposed to the copy list? i.e. my whole database is despatched to everyone else. We have heard of this happening to one major supermarket when they sent to a list of 125,000 customers.
I get a 10%, 20% or even 40% response rate. How will I manage this and provide "instant gratification"?
I get a 30% bounce rate - what do I do?
I get FLAMED by outraged respondents who think that I am SPAMMING them?
20% of my recipients cannot cope with my HTML message? 30% of my recipients are behind firewalls?

The message is: EMAIL MARKETING is easy to get wrong!

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