In just a few short years, e-mail marketing has emerged as both a top-notch tool and a tricky challenge.
On the one hand, e-mail promotion excels at boosting business results, and is likely the most cost-effective marketing tactic you can find. On the other hand, we are all paying a price for that success.
Because it’s so affordable and efficient, everyone and anyone is using e-mail to send sales messages these days. The result is a daily tsunami of mail, much of it spam.
Worse, after a relative lull, spam is surging again, according to market researcher IDC—in part because threats to inboxes now come from newer technologies, not just text. Spam-based messages are proliferating as MP3 files, image-based messages, and voice-over-IP (VoIP) drive more electronic communications. In 2007, of the nearly 97 billion e-mails sent daily worldwide, more than 40 billion were earmarked as spam, the IDC reports.
If you plan to invest time and money in e-mail marketing efforts—and it's still a smart thing to do—here’s how to make sure your customers will value and respond to your messages. (Also, be sure to see the E-mail Marketing feature of Office Live Small Business.)
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