Despite the glamor and excitement of websites, blogs, videos, webinars and teleseminars email remains the dominant form of online marketing today.
However, many companies and individual business people misuse it or use it less than optimally.
Of course, spam is out.
This book is a guide to responsible and effective email marketing.
Yet, let's face it, although I opt in to a company's email list either out of curiosity, to get a freebie or just wind up there by having made a purchase, I still resent them taking up space in my inbox with a lot of emails about things I don't care about.
Amazon does one of the best jobs of figuring out what people want, yet I still don't appreciate their emails alerting me to new books.
I have plenty to read.
When I'm interested, I go to their site and search for what I want.
However, I suspect that many people do buy from Amazon emails.
This book starts out describing five types of emails: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Product Usage, and Retention and Loyalty.
I'd argue with the first one.
If a prospect has opted into your list, they're already aware of you.
They must have visited your web site.
However, I know that some companies rent lists of email addresses of people who supposedly have agreed to receive commercial messages.
Technically, this isn't spam, but the line is thin.
But most of those people are probably not good prospects.
I'd also argue with the third type.
Email is not a good medium with which to convert prospects into customers.
That's the job of the sales copy on the web site.
The best use of email at this stage is to increase increase the prospect's interest in your product so they return to the website where the actual conversion takes place.
Part of this, to be realistic, is just your email reminding the prospect that you exist.
They've already visited your website, they put off buying what you're selling, but they were interested enough to opt in to your list.
Then they browsed away and probably forgot about you.
So emails to prospects act as both reminders and desire re-activators.
Web sites are for closing the sale.
Product usage is a good one, since too many marketers and business people forget about their prospects after making the sale.
The sharp ones send emails with instructions and reminders and tips and how-tos.
Retention and Loyalty emails can again be useful information on how to best use the product or information -- along with creating interest in different products you sell.
So cross-selling and up-selling to higher-priced products should be included.
Or, if your product is consumable, such as vitamins, you should remind customers when it's time to re-order.
The remainder of the book goes into a lot of good detail on opt in strategies, landing pages, using email to get feedback, incorporating audio and video, prospect segmentation and other strategies.
A well-known fitness and self-help guru makes about a million dollars from his emails.
And he doesn't do anything as complicated as what this book describes.
He sends emails out almost every day, but they're fun and interesting to read.
Capturing the hearts of your prospects is the real secret.