I have a ‘quick draw’. I barely scan an email message before deleting it if it isn’t immediately apparent to be of interest to me. I also have my junk mail options set to their most ‘brutal’. For the most part, if I’m not already expecting the email, a subscriber to the company or service, or if it isn’t from someone I know directly, it will immediately go to the junk folder. That doesn’t mean I don’t quickly scan emails in the junk folder prior to deleting – just to make sure I don’t ‘throw out the baby with the bath water’.
Considering my own feelings about email and email spam, I have completely put off looking into email marketing services to avoid being seen as a nuisance, or worse yet – a spammer.
Through my own experience, though, I have realized that the emails I do pay attention to are the ones coming from those with whom I already do business. So what’s stopping me from email marketing to my new or existing readers?
To this end, I checked out an email (yea, that’s right) regarding icontact.com’s email marketing service and found some good, reassuring information.
This company offers advisory services in which they lead one through the hurdles of marketing through email and achieving great results; solutions for large, volume senders including tracking, reports and segmentation; and most important to me, design services to prepare templates, subscription pages, forms, conversion of documents into html for emails, and message testing.
Once I’ve decided my goals and methods of achieving them, I will be looking into email marketing further.