The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

Chapter 5. It's Not Your Father's E-Mail

What's In It for You?

Do you think you know e-mail? Probably—since most people have been e-mailing for about a decade and a half now. Even before there was officially e-mail, companies were sending messages asking others in their trusted network to look at their web site or buy their products. And although spam (called by other names, such as "junk mail" or "rubbish") had existed in bulletin boards (see Chapter 7, The Internet Forum, and Chapter 6, The World of Web Pages), it—and other commercial marketing messages—came to fruition in an especially strong manner through the birth of e-mail. After all, there isn't any other form of advertising that has a more reliable return on investment (ROI) than e-mail. What other marketing medium allows you to reach 5,000 to 50,000 of your potential customers for (nearly) free (or very inexpensively priced with the help of an e-mail service)?

When e-mail is utilized correctly, its conversion rate—the rate at which it turns potential customers into actual customers—can be phenomenal. It has the power to exponentially exceed the results generated by conventional direct mail, newspaper, magazine, and cost-prohibitive radio and television advertising. The Internet is one of the very media that actually allows advertisers to count how many impressions, responses, conversations, and pass-alongs their ads produce, and thereby determine exactly how many sales can be attributed to each e-mail campaign.

E-mail is ...