Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Chapter 3. What’s Wrong with Email?

Even the best things in life have drawbacks. Maybe you take a vacation but have loads of work waiting for you when you get back. Or maybe you can afford a luxury car but are forced to spend more money on gas. I know you get my point. While email is the greatest marketing tool of all time, unfortunately, there’s a four-letter word that can skew its effectiveness: spam (the technical term for unsolicited commercial email, not the tinned meat kind).

Before we get into further detail on email and spam, I’d like us to first cover two mass marketing tactics: reach and frequency.

Reach marketing refers to how many different individuals you can touch. The marketing theory is that the more people you touch, the more successful you will be. That’s why mass marketers look for advertising with the highest traffic counts possible. Obviously, this is what’s made prime time television such a valuable property. By putting your commercials on television, you’re assured they are going to be seen by millions of people. But we should probably change the last part of the sentence to: You’re assured they are going to be shown to millions of people, and those who pay attention will actually see your commercials.

If you really have a big budget, you can afford to run these ads more often and on more channels. You’ll be everywhere, which means your audience will always be thinking about you, right? In other words, you’ll be able to increase the frequency of your marketing, ...