Bridging The Gap Between Email And Blog Marketing
Posted on March 10th, 2006by Michael Gray in Advertising, Blogs, Ideas, SEM
Last Christmas I ventured out of the virtual intraweb-affiliate-blogo-forum-sphere and soccer mom worlds that I spend most of my time in, and went to my wife’s company Christmas Holiday Party. I was talking with some people and mentioned blogs and got the cat stare (you know the look when you tell a cat to do something and doesn’t understand a word you said). So I got to thinking while I may get blogging, there’s are a whole group of people who just are not up to speed with the blog world.
Yes there are things we can do to make blogging more accessible like using “my yahoo”, “my msn” and “my google” buttons. I also think that what Ask Jeeves did to incorporate bloglines into the new homepage was pretty clever. However enough people don’t have a “shortage of incoming information problem” (real or percieved) that they need blogging to fill in their lives. So for a marketer you have to rely on interruptive and hopefully permission based marketing via email. I have few websites where I capture email address via basic signup forms, contests, or other promotional efforts, but I hadn’t really done anything with them. Back in January I read Andy’s post on newsletters increasing the value of your blog ( see Double Your Blog’s Stock With a Newsletter) and it was the kick in the ass I needed to get things going.
I tinkered with a home grown solutions but CANSPAM was just too scary, so I went with a service provider. I looked at a few and settled on Constant Contact (see Constant Contact Review for more information). Earlier this week I sent out my second campaign and have to say I’m pretty depressed with the results. I wasn’t expecting to make a fortune, but was looking to make a little profit or at least cover the cost of the service, neither of which has happened. Now my list is fairly small (less than 500 people) so even if 1% made a purchase that would only be 5 sales. However my biggest problem is actually getting past the spam filters. When I tested the emails in house spam bayes in outlook and thunderbird both initially flagged the email messages as spam, so while unpleasant, my low open rate wasn’t shocking. Out of 500 about 80 emails actually got through. Email marketing may not be dead, but IMHO it’s on the downward slope.
I don’t think companines should abandon email marketing entirely, but I think blending email marketing with RSS marketing is the best strategy for the near term future. The question is how do you get people who don’t read blogs, to subscribe to them. I think we aren’t going to have a breakthrough moment until people can read feeds in Outlook or Outlook Express. I know Newsgator currently does this, but it’s an add on product and has an additional cost (so who’s going to pay for a solution to a problem they don’t think they have). I don’t it’s not going to really catch on until an embeded solution comes out of the box. I know RSS is going to be a part of Vista but haven’t read much on integration into the new windows email clients to know if it’s going to happen.
Have any of you tried migrating subscribers from email to RSS? What did you try, what worked and what didn’t? What do you think will help bridge the gap?
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March 10th, 2006 at 6:47 am
Does Constant Contact not have a built-in spam filter? I use AWeber and they assign each email a spam score by passing it through SpamAssassin and then telling you what’s wrong with the email and giving you a chance to correct it. Works well for me for my newsletter and for other emails I send. Of course, sometimes you can’t help getting flagged as spam… like when I tell people how to get my free e-book “the two words that can make you rich” then that email tends to get flagged and there’s not much I can do about it!
Also, when you collect email addresses, don’t forget to ask people to add you to their whitelist on the registration thank you page.
Eric
March 10th, 2006 at 8:37 am
We tried to introduce RSS to our technical service group earlier this year, with the idea that we could move notifications of website inquiries away from e-mail into RSS. My idea was, and still is, to move our very busy corporate website into a Web 2.0 mode, and begin to create a community involving our customers, customer service, technical service, engineering and sales teams. RSS would be integral in the process, and I figured our tech service guys would be the most likely to accept new technology.
The ‘deer in the headlights’ stares and feedback I received when proposing this was very surprising to me. I concluded that we would need to ‘ease’ into this, and that an abrupt change would be likely to fail.
Most of these folks are what I would consider technology early adopters, yet none of them were prepared for RSS. When I talk about this to the average user they literally have no clue.
I know that this is a generalization, but you can, to a certain extent, find the technology level of your blog users by the browser they’re using. Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Konqueror users are more likely to be technology early adopters, IE users are more likely to be mainstream users. If you’re so lucky as to get noticed by Digg or Slashdot you’ll find IE users at less than 10%. My blog is geared toward lower technology folks, yet I still average IE users of only 27%. In contrast, our very mainstream corporate website sees IE users at over 91%. I think you can get a feeling where RSS integration would be most readily adopted
I strongly believe that the release of Vista and Explorer 7 later this year will begin to expose the average user to the idea of RSS, and that it will reach a tipping point sometime next year. After that, watch out, all bets are off (or on, depending on your viewpoint).
March 10th, 2006 at 8:59 am
one of the things i’m about to try with a site of mine is to give the users blogs, rationale being that everyone wants others to read their crap but no one is particularly interested in reading the crap of others. once users have a blog and start using it the idea of rss will become intuitive, and its value will be appreciated and utilized. or so the thinking goes.
March 10th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Good point about asking people to whitelist the email address you are sending from.
March 10th, 2006 at 9:15 am
My impression is that the entryway into RSS adoption is not going to be through the tech channels, but through MyYahoo and the portal sites.
By marketing your weblog into these sites, with RSS cloaked as a tool they can understand, penetration can occur. Otherwise we will be relegated to the technically proficient fringe.
March 10th, 2006 at 10:11 am
I noticed recently a majority of my subscribers are from myYahoo. I was really shocked.
Also since your looking at email Graywolf, you might be interested in this email study from MarketingSherpa
March 10th, 2006 at 10:35 am
There’s also another avenue to explore: making your blog available via email. I do this with my blog, and it’s trivial for me because AWeber has this service that automatically broadcasts an RSS feed to a mailing list. So I created a mailing list just for my blog and anyone who signs up for it gets each blog posting mailed to them, usually within an hour or so of me posting it. They don’t have to fiddle with an RSS reader… some people are just more comfortable with email, that’s all, and I like having the option. I only has 12 people signed up on this service so far, which is not a huge number, but that’s 12 people I might not otherwise reach. Well, 11, because I think my father is one of the signups, so he doesn’t count
March 15th, 2006 at 11:32 am
Wow dude those results are terrible, mine have been much better…
are your sites in areas where there’s normally a lot of spam? i.e., even if your Credit card site & list are completely legit it’s gonna be hard to get it thru…
March 15th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Yep health and fitness weight loss type of stuff, so I knew it was uphill battle
March 16th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Just FYI, for your readers who may not be aware, Bloglet.com offers a free service to send blog posts to subscribers via email.
And you can see the email addresses of your subscribers - possible to paste into your subscribers list if you ever decide to switch to something more hardy, like Aweber.
For a small blog starting out and/or someone with a limited budget or “testing the waters”, it’s a viable alternative to Aweber and GetResponse et al…