E-mail keeps on going
As Rafat Ali points out in his excellent e-mail newsletter (well it would be woulnd’t it), e-mail’s still got it. You can read his post yourself, but it’s interesting what Jeff DeBalko (ex-eLogic) says in the BtoBOnline article.
In fact, we’ve been unsubscribing (non-)readers (those that don’t open e-mails regularly) at Economist.com for years (which is what Prescott Shibles, VP-online development/new media at Prism Business Media says they do in the article, but a bit more agressively).
I suppose, though, that you need to know what you’re trying to do with your e-mail newsletters in the first place. Economist.com have two types (as do many others) - one that can be read and makes sense by itself with the other encouraging click-throughs to the main site to get the full story.
The first of these could live as a commercial product by itself (with paying advertisers) whilst the second is essentially a traffic-driver or value-add (as with the WSJ alerts). You wouldn’t want to unsubscribe someone from alerts if they are designed to be useful without the need to even open them.
But I guess that’s obvious.
November 14th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
The progress of technology makes it much easier for companies to reach much broader audience, and normally at near-zero marginal cost. Therefore whatever we do, we tend to think in terms of how we can make our life much easier. However, we should truly think of how we can make life of our customers (in E-mail newsletter’s case, the subscribers) easier. Of course, no single customer is the same and the needs change over time. Rightly so companies should provide a mix of both. Key questions are how often and what?
Will they ever be loyal enough to stick with a company and wait for the changes? Most likely they won’t. They simply vote with their silience and/or non-action. The real challenge lies in how we can effectively spot the latent danger before it’s all too late.