So apparently for me, part of the Optimistic Rebel blog is exploring the contradiction in things—as in how can one be optimistic and rebellious at the same time. So this post by Jeff Pulver on e-mail Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in a Web 2.0 World caught my eye.
While I totally agree with his suggestions, I’m curious about the premise—that Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed the way we expect to receive emails. While I think that you’ll get better responses by being more personal, I think that it’s because people used to communicating via email are used to the impersonal nature of the medium. Any extra effort is like a glass of water in the desert.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s essential to respect the person you’re targeting. I’m just wondering—what percentage of people on a web 2.0 platform (for example, twitter) would prefer to receive a shorter version of the email you’d send them there? What’s the ratio of social media adopters to email users? If the survey says Boomers aren’t into social networks, doesn’t that include Web 2.0? If they don’t use platforms like twitter, why would they expectations be any different for email?
As I’ve said before, make sure your demographics align with the channel you’re using. As a PCer , with a blog, twitter account, and being on various social networks, it makes more sense to connect with me there. Beyond that, I avoid email as much as possible, for the reasons I list above. As much as everyone clamors about Jason Calacanis’ retirement from blogging to focus on a listserv and his proclamation that blogging is dead, I don’t think an email to 750 subscribers (while abandoning the medium he profited from as CEO of Weblogs Inc.) is as immediate and intimate as he’d like to think.
Would you agree or disagree? Why?
3 responses so far ↓
1 Megan Kacvinsky // Aug 5, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Just read your post, and then checked out one of my other fave blogs - PerezHilton.com. I found it interesting b/c today Perez announced the launch of numerous site upgrades, including an enewsletter. This almost goes in reverse order of the scenario you described above, starting with social media (a blog) and then using more traditional forms of ecommunication.
Personally I still feel email has a strong future (meaning at least 5 years in Internet-land) because its a push communication method, is easy to set-up and is extremely cost-effective. So many other online communication channels (RSS in particular) are still somewhat confusing to set-up and understand for non-technical people. And they require “training” a customer to remember to log-in to another service and check their messages, for the most part email is just a part of people’s everyday routine.
2 George Nemeth // Aug 5, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Thanks, Megan. One of the issues I have with email is that it gives you zero SEO juice. If all you have is a newsletter, you’re taking all of that content and sticking it into a black box. I think developing a newsletter based on feedback from a blog is a savvy move—mostly because that’s what I’ve done with the blog stuff in CoolCleveland.com’s enewsletter.
I’ll push back on the cost-effectiveness of email. It may be considered cost effective in comparison to direct mailing print pieces, but the cost of acquisition and distribution has been steadily increasing (mostly due to spam) and i don’t foresee that cost decreasing.
3 Rob MacKay // Aug 11, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Looking at it from an advertisers point of view, as much as people despise the mass quantity of email that they receive, it is the place where they expect to receive commercial correspondence. It will certainly be interesting to see if a generational difference develops where younger folks to similarly “expect” social media to be a channel for advertisements. I think it’s a long way off.
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