“What About SPAM and Privacy Concerns?”

The hottest topic in email marketing today is SPAM. As corporations and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) work to control the amount of unsolicited email entering their systems, they may inadvertently filter out legitimate emails, including some ENewsletters. In industry lingo, this type of error is known as a “false positive,” and the result is that some emails sent to people who have requested them don’t ever reach their destination.
But, let’s put that into perspective. Even with SPAM’s impact, a good E-Newsletter sent to your house list will stil be opened by over 40% of the people it’s sent to. Given typical response rates to traditional marketing tactics, that’s as much as 40 times better than the percentage of people who read your newspaper ads; respond to your direct mail; or return your unsolicited phone calls.
The fact is, for the small business owner, an E-Newsletter represents the first time in history that we’ve ever been able to cost effectively communicate with our entire customer and prospect base over and over and over again. Not only that, but thanks to the inherently democratic nature of email (i.e. the big boys don’t get any more space in the email inbox than the rest of us), an E-Newsletter gives us the opportunity to not just compete with, but outperform our much larger competitors for the attention of readers.
And so, while SPAM has certainly reduced some of the effectiveness of E-Newsletters in recent months, this remarkable tool is by no means past its prime.