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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People are bombarded with hundreds of email messages each day. However a majority of the emails end up in the trash because of their irrelevance to the recipients.

On Oct 30th, 2008 I write a blog post on relevancy and emails. To state my point I showed an example of an email that John Song received from Nordstrom. John, who had never purchased any women products from Nordstrom, was receiving emails promoting women products. Read More…

Social site Tagged.com is facing the second big lawsuit over its registration process in as many months. First NY AG Andrew Cuomo (always a popular figure with social networks!) threatened to bring a lawsuit against Tagged for stealing emails and spamming “millions of Americans,” and now two women from California are suing Tagged for stealing their email contacts.

Okay, so maybe that’s not “big,” but it does stand to set a precedent.

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I know I’ve talked about this subject before, but it bears repeating. Your email newsletter competes for eyeballs from your readers. Unless you have a readership sitting at their computers waiting for just the right email from you, you have only a few seconds to get their attention before they hit the delete key.

Based on what I’ve been seeing in my email box, there are a lot of you who didn’t “get the memo” on this topic. During this month, I have received no less than ten email newsletters that have the subject:

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I have to admit that any story about e-mail marketing and an increase in open rates is a bit baffling. Why? I know how I handle e-mail these days. A quick scan and if the sender or subject doesn’t ring a bell I have developed the Internet equivalent of a quick trigger finger – check the box then flush it with the rest of the e-mail I have no time for. I realize that I don’t represent everyone by any stretch but the amount of e-mail coming down the pike on a daily basis is daunting. As for anything unfortunate enough to hit my spam folder? No hope there. I rarely peruse it and usually just send it packing.

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Forrester Research says that marketers say they see ROI on email marketing that’s two to three times higher than any other form of direct marketing. 66% of marketers agree that email is the most cost-effective marketing tool at their company.

So why shouldn’t you waste money on email marketing?

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