It's All Geek To Me - February 15th 2006

Email Marketing - Fancy or Simple, It Just Works. I am not a football fan, and I didn't even watch the Super Bowl - but I knew it was over when Amazon sent me a message at 10:34 PM Sunday night. To: ross@itsallgeektome.com From: "Amazon.com" <promo-core@amazon.com> Subject: Steelers Super Bowl XL Gear from Amazon.com I am always fascinated by email marketing trends, so I clicked through on this message. As I was doing that, I was sure an equally impressive and well designed "Congratulations, Seahawks" message had just been thrown in the trash at Amazon.

The result of that click has been pretty amusing in the last ten days. I pretty much buy two kinds of books at Amazon: geek books and exotic animal/science books. The Amazon Recommend engine has taken this - and my supposed newfound football interest - and spit out some interesting titles at me. . . .

The Physics of Football
Science and Football

I confess to you that neither title actually interests me, but they did correctly 1) identify a geek who displayed a sports interest; and, 2) offer up suggestions I'd most likely buy as a result. I giggled at this while surfing their site, and yes, I did "add to cart" a few times, as usual.

This is advanced email marketing brought to you by a giant in the industry with massive budgets, amazing technology, and some of the best brains in the business working to make it better all the time.

The amazing thing to me is that the basic principle of what they are doing - relationship marketing - is at least as strong, if not stronger, when executed by very small players.

As some of you know, I used to breed reptiles for a living - we'll skip that story for now and simply say I have pet snakes. Those snakes eat mice - and I usually get those from Rodentpro.com. They're a very small Indiana-based company with what is definitely a very narrow niche product - they sell frozen reptile food.

They did some interesting email marketing recently as well - excess inventory caused a brief sale to assure "product freshness" - so I clicked on over and ordered some snake food. Even if I hadn't bought anything I would remember that they are so committed to freshness (yes, this is an actual reptile food issue) they put things on sale to be sure to maintain it.

When KISS was founded in the late 90's I used to spend Friday afternoons making "follow" calls - checking in with many prospects while using a complex rating system to decide which ones to call again the following week. The day the first issue of this newsletter went out was the last time I ever made one of those calls. Prospects simply receive this newsletter every two weeks, now, and if they are interested they call us.

No matter what you may sell, the web site visitor action you most want - your MDR (Most Desired Response) - is a purchase. That's a given for every website out there.

Today, the SDR (secondary desired response) has become a given as well - you want their email address. The more complicated your product or service, the more true this is. Whether you use an advanced system to send messages (a service bureau like Constant Contact, for instance) or a simple email program, you'll form relationships with those prospects and convert them into customers over time. You'll educate existing customers, get them to buy more, and form an open, two-way communication channel.

If you don't have an email marketing plan with specific goals this year, you should make one today. It need not be fancy - the real keys to effective email marketing are consistency, persistence and worthwhile reading material.

Simply put - it just works.