Business in Science and General Truth

Let’s face it, email marketing is effective. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be getting scores of spam everyday. Or attempted spam that is. Though spam, the affectionate name given to unsolicited bulk email, still proliferates on the internet, it’s much less of a hassle to the average user these days.

Most spammers are clandestine “boiler-room” operations who use guerrilla advertising tactics to get their emails to you. They may come up with a trick here and there to get their emails past your spam filtering, but eventually the spam filtering will figure it out and block them too.

So, how does an advertiser use email without having the email be construed as spam? There are several key ways to do this:

1. Build your own list of email addresses to mail to. This can be done several ways. Ask your current customers to refer friends and family to you. You should be doing this anyway. By giving your customers an extra incentive to share the love about you, you will almost always get them.

2. Offer your website visitors an incentive to get on your mailing list. This can be anything from a monthly drawing for a trip to Disney World, to a gift certificate to their favorite restaurant. The money you spend on premiums will be more than worth it when you find you have several thousand new people you can directly market to regularly with their permission.

3. “Piggy-back” your offer on another non-competing company’s mailing list. Many companies have solid, responsive lists that they will let you have a crack at for a piece of the action. The easiest way to give these other companies a piece of the action is by having an affiliate program in place. An affiliate program is a very effective marketing strategy utilized by major sites from Ebay to Amazon.com. Once set up as an affiliate, the company sending out the email will now get paid per sale or per click based on what your affiliate program stipulates. It’s an outstanding win-win situation, and with the responding leads you get, you can optimize a solid list of potential future buyers.

4. Use opt-in marketing companies - These companies put all their efforts into getting people to opt-in to receive their marketing emails. The result are highly qualified lists of email addresses. Usually by providing incentives of cash or premiums to do so. A good example is Inbox Dollars. Formulate an offer you want to provide via email and contract the company to make it happen. Again, most will work with you if you have a solid affiliate program, otherwise they will charge you for adding your offer to their emails.

I’ve had this wild advertising theory for some time. It’s so crazy it just might work. I target it towards retailers who sell generally the same products as their competitors. Are you sitting? Here it goes: NO ADVERTISING!

Every year the big guns shell out millions of dollars on advertising campaigns while retailers provide shelf space to ply their brands. From toothpaste to tank tops, televisions to toilet paper, retailers become generic outlets where customers can easily obtain the same products from any of them. Advertising campaigns are then launched in all media to carve out a niche and create some distinction.
I have observed all too often, that even with the most meticulously designed campaigns, many businesses fail to retain new customers by having the quality of the customer experience let them down. Whether its poor store layout, poorly trained employees, poor customer service, all the way down the “poor list”, the best advertising in the world makes no impact. What’s worse is that management continues to scratch their heads in wonder.

My theory is premised on the fact that customers are not easily fooled by flashy marketing gimmicks, but may give the business the benefit of the doubt and then make it prove itself. If it doesn’t, then the jig is up and they take their business elsewhere. This means that advertising money is better spent on improving the customer experience from top to bottom.

A business would normally throw a penny on the above and a pound on advertising at the same time. So for a business adopting this for the first time I would suggest combining the full advertising budget together with the pittance it usually flings at the customer experience, for the first year. From the second year onwards, it can use half the advertising, then sit back and let the customers do the marketing for you.

Marketing 101 teaches that a customer tells more people about a bad experience than a good one. The stigma of a bad experience can be felt long after you lose the customer because that story keeps circulating. But if nine customers out of ten have a great experience (and ten out of ten is not farfetched) can you imagine the mileage that would give? In this internet age of My Space and Facebook, can you spell “viral”?

Since this is so radical, many retailers may not do it, which leaves them with many disgruntled customers eager to defect. In the past, there was nothing to defect to, except more of the same at another store. Now they have radical you.

That’s it, good old word of mouth. The more things change, the more they remain the same. It’s like building a better mousetrap- the world beats a path to your door. Forget advertising campaigns and spend a fraction of that money on all the aspects that touch the customer. Do it like your business life depended on it, because it does.