I was traversing the internet, and came across an interesting article concerning email. The piece was written by Steve Johnson, of Chicago Tribune. He writes of the phenomenon known as ‘joint email accounts’, where couples (married or not) share an email account. It’s quite an amusing article, and it got me thinking about various email accounts in general - the differences in how people use them, and the different ways people view their email accounts in a broad sense.
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While the exact number of reasons is a little hard to pin down, private equity firm TA Associates provided a whole lot of them this week as it showed that it’s not time to give on the email marketing industry.  TA Associates bought a majority stake in eCircle for about 60 million (or $87 million).

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If someone were to ask you, “Is the recession over?”, how would you respond? A Silverpop survey of 300 email marketers showed that nine out of 10 respondents believe the recession is still occurring. It can be really hard to define what an actual ‘recession’ is, especially to decipher when one is improving or worsening. Sometimes perception is more important than actual truth though, and it says quite a bit that most email marketers are pessimistic about the recession.
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Often we forget the little guy, the SMB, in our discussions of the comings and goings of the Internet marketing industry. Sure there are times like this when a report surfaces talking about their issues and concerns but, for the most part, we like to talk about big brands and how they do the Internet marketing thing well or not so well.

Of course, when you consider that 95% of the businesses in the US are considered an SMB of some shape or size it should make one think a little more about the impact this market segment has in the overall scheme of things. Unfortunately, ‘too big to fail’ bailouts don’t await the little guy. Instead the SMB needs to make due with what they have and be as smart about how they spend their marketing dollars as possible.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problem with PR email, the results of a survey on people’s attitudes to the email that PR agencies and others send them.

The survey paints a dismal picture of how email is used in the PR business.

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It’s tough to engage in email advertising these days. The market isn’t going anywhere, as numbers indicate a rise. However, stories like this one, involving one of the largest websites on the internet engaging in email fraud certainly doesn’t help.

Tagged.com has been ordered to pay the state of New York and Texas $750,000 in damages for intruding on member’s contact list in order to send out millions of promotional emails to potential users. The website is a social networking platform, and is one of the most visited sites on the web.
You might be saying to yourself, ’sounds like a pretty creative idea. It would be if Tagged.com sent the emails out as themselves. Instead, the site misled their recipients by making the emails appear to be from friends on Tagged.com. Hence, the scandal.
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Despite the widespread popularity of social media and text messaging, the rate at which online consumers are increasing email usage compared to decreasing is more than double the rate for both emerging media, according to a new report by ExactTarget.

The report found a positive connection among consumer usage of email, instant messaging, social networks and text messaging, dispelling myths that the explosion of social media and texting will overtake email usage.
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To hear some people tell it, email - and therefore email marketing - is facing yet another threat on its life.  They think Google Wave will revolutionize the way people contact each other and replace older forms of communication.  Or it won’t, as some stats and early reviews indicate.

ExactTarget published a whitepaper today, and according to a statement, “the research found a positive correlation among consumer usage of email, instant messaging, social networks and text messaging, dispelling myths that the explosion of social media and texting will overtake traditional email usage.”

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A staple in any customer retention program is the ability to write emails that strengthen relationships, get responses, and persuade action. Not enough attention is often paid to this critical component of building a business (and when attention is given to it, I too frequently see it performed incorrectly.) As such I am going to cover a number of topics spread over a series of articles that will help you develop more effective email follow-up campaigns.

The first thing you have to do in building an effective email follow-up program is to determine your desired outcome of each email (you can’t build an effective email if you don’t know what you want to achieve from it.)

Depending on your desired outcome a response could be any number of things. Overall though, emails have three primary roles.

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While everyone (myself included) is fawning over Twitter, Facebook and other social media marketing tools, you have to feel a little bit sorry for email marketing.

After all, email marketing has been around for a while and has proven itself again and again as an essential tool for the small business or entrepreneur. So why do we cast our old friend away just because a new, sexier tool appears? Where is our loyalty?

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