NoisyWorld News:
Email Marketing: Three Basic Rules | Friend Us, Fan Us

Welcome to the latest issue of the NoisyWorld News. In this issue we're taking another look at the possibilities of the Internet by stepping away from the website and peeking into other areas that can promote your business.

Email Marketing: Three Basic Rules

Using e-mail to promote your business. What could be simpler? You gather up a bunch of e-mail addresses, write a nice note, and click Send.

Actually, the above scenario is a recipe for trouble - big trouble. In the years since the arrival of e-mail, there's been a boom in unwanted e-mails, affectionately named "spam" - and most of them seem to advertise the kind of product you wouldn't want anyone to know you needed, even if you actually needed it.

Add to that the fact that legislation has made the random bombarding of e-mail addresses with unwanted solicitations a crime - and that business or individuals so doing can be fined for each complaining address - well, it looks more and more like the kind of morass that one wants to avoid stepping in.

So is it even worth promoting your business with e-mail? Of course! You just have to use a few guidelines to keep out of trouble.

1) Get permission to market to every e-mail address that you collect.

This sounds like it can be a daunting task, but if you make it a part of the collection process, it can be fairly painless. If you harvest e-mails on your website, make sure users know that by surrendering their address, they are giving you the right to contact you. They should also have the chance to "opt out" of receiving any e-mails from you.

If you have an existing list of e-mails that you have collected, say at a series of trade shows, you may wish to individually send each address an e-mail confirming their address and asking whether they want to receive information from you. When someone hands you a business card it does not necessarily mean they want marketing from you in their inbox. This process will separate the wants from the want-nots.

2) Once you have permission to market to them, do not overwhelm your audience.

You know how when the first spam arrives from Uncle Smedley's Hair Restorative Formula, it is like a herald announcing a plague of Biblical proportions? Suddenly Uncle Smedley is knocking at your inbox several times a day, and until your software or server's spam filter can isolate the address, he bombards you with other offers for offshore investments, foreign brides, and herbal supplements to address physical problems you didn't know you had.

This is not how you want to treat those who have entrusted you with their e-mail address. These folks should know up front what they are allowing you to send ("our exciting monthly newsletter"), and this is something you should adhere to. So keep it cool and deliver only what you promise.

3) Be sensitive to their needs.

We could write an entire dissertation on this section alone. Now that you have their permission, the pitch begins! But before you wind up, take a moment to think about if it's going to be a fastball or a slider. The way you present your material makes the difference between readers seeing you as a welcome vendor or an unwelcome pest.

If any of the following are in your plans, you should seriously reconsider your e-mail marketing strategy:

• Avalanching list members with information about your entire product line - even if their business only uses one specific item or service,
• including an essay about your company that is roughly the length of War and Peace,
• using a series of ginormous photos too big to fit entirely on the screen, or
• requiring the use of something the user may have disabled (such as Java or Flash) in order to "get the full experience."

Make what you send to your list short and sweet. If your list is big enough, sort it into categories based on the buying habits of your client. Keep pictures down in number and size. If you want them to see your big Flash extravaganza, put in a link that points to your web page. If you want to give them something, give them the choice between receiving your missive in either text or html formatting. Anything else will waste the time and computer resources of everybody involved.

When you play by these few simple rules, you can easily turn your marketing plans into news your list will use - not news they will lose.

Friend Us, Fan Us

Here at WRL we're believers in the use of social media (sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) to help promote business, and what better way to showing our believerhood than by getting involved with things ourselves?

That's why Just About All of your favorite WRL denizens are on LinkedIn, and Almost All of us are on Facebook. We've also gone one step further and set up our own WRL Advertising Fan Page on Facebook.

The page features glimpses of WRLers at play, samples of our creative work, frequent updates about what we're up to, and of course, comments from fans. In the future we hope to bring you more goodies, such as behind-the-scenes looks at how we work. Think of it as WRL bonus features, only you don't have to put in a DVD to see them.

So stop by our Facebook page and fan us to automatically get updates delivered to your own account. Also, you can also click on any of the icons at the top of our Employee Page to connect with our WRL Facebook Fan Page, WRL LinkedIn Company Page, and WRL Flickr, and WRL YouTube accounts. It's the easy way to keep up with what WRL is doing!