Better Than A Feast (Part 2)

If you're looking for success in internet marketing, here's another example of how important it is to strike a balance between what you want and what the people on your mailing list will stand for.

In a recent posting I wrote of my annoyance at being mailed by the same person 6 times in one weekend. Didn't someone once say, "You ain't seen nothing yet"? Well, I obviously hadn't.

I've now received an e-mail from another marketer whose list I'd joined because he promised me he'd never mail me more than once a week. That was fine with me.

Unfortunately, despite his promise, it clearly wasn't fine with him. His latest e-mail boasted that he'd been doing an internet marketing course, and he'd learned a great new marketing technique.

All he had to do to multiply his earnings beyond recognition, he said, was mail his list, not once a week, as promised, and not even once a day, but several times a day. As if to prove it, there were three other mails from him downloading while I read the first one.

He may not have been aware of it, but sending more mails than you've promised is not regarded as giving extra value - it's actually classed as spam.

You have to have consent to send commercial mails to anyone, and if they've given you consent to mail them only once a week, or whatever limit you've assured them will be all you'll send, you don't have their consent to mail them any more than that.

If you make that kind of promise, then you have to keep it. If you decide you want to send more mail, you have to ask them first.

The best way is to keep your weekly mailing list, and simply ask the people on it if they'd also like to join one where they'll get more frequent mails from you - if you offer something useful in exchange some will agree, and at least the others aren't going to unsubscribe.

Keeping your promise is about a whole lot more than simply staying on the right side of the anti-spam laws, though, important though that is. It's about persuading people on your list to trust you... because if they don't, they aren't going to buy from you. Not ever.

If they can't rely on you to keep your word on something as simple as how often you're going to e-mail them, why would they believe you when you tell them how great your products are, or that you'll honor any guarantees you give them... and if they can't trust you not to abuse their e-mail address, how are they going to trust you with their credit card details?

No matter what any course might try to tell you, success in internet marketing is much less about techniques than it is about two very basic things - consideration for the people that you deal with, and some simple common sense.

If you expect to be able to trust the people that you buy from, remember that your customers expect the same from you. If you don't want your inbox flooded out with mail, remember no-one else does, either.

If the advice you're given is to take some course of action that you wouldn't want someone else to do to you, you can be sure that people will react badly if you go ahead with it... but if you wish that other people would treat you as well as you look after your customers and the people on your mailing list, you're heading for Supreme Success. Go for it!

Much Better Than A Feast

A word of heartfelt advice to everyone whose vision of Supreme Success includes Internet marketing - when it comes to e-mailing prospective customers, enough is much, much better than a feast.

Recently I was sent an invitation to an online event known as a Joint Venture Giveaway. In case you haven't come across one, it involves downloading free e-books and software in return for giving your e-mail address to online marketers.

Sounds like a good idea? Well... maybe.

Some of the gifts turned out to be worth having, others much less so. That's only natural. So is the fact that the online marketers in question, having got permission to contact me, have been taking full advantage.

I really didn't mind at first. Some of the offers have been good ones (and, yes, there have been one or two I couldn't quite resist!).

The problem is, I'd based the number I'd signed up for on the assumption that I'd get one or two e-mails from each list every week, which would be manageable – and that's not how it's worked out.

Most have mailed me every day, and some much more than that. My e-mail program's crashed repeatedly, and I quickly reached the point of loathing e-mail.

I thought I'd got the situation under control by unsubscribing from the main offenders' lists, but this morning when I checked my mail I discovered to my annoyance that one marketer whose list I'd stayed on had over the weekend sent me 6 e-mails, inviting me to buy 6 different products.

A bit of common sense would come in handy here.

First, some people have a life outside of work, whether that's online or otherwise, and don't download their e-mails at the weekend. That means they're getting 6 of them in one go, Monday morning... and that's assuming that you haven't started off the working week by sending more of them. It's unlikely that they'll be delighted.

Secondly, if you get e-mail addresses through Joint Venture Giveaways, please bear in mind the people who will sign up for your list will also sign up for lots more through the same Joint Venture offer.

That means they're going to get a lot of mail, which, in turn, means they're going to unsubscribe from most lists very quickly... and, because they cause the biggest nuisance, the lists they're going to come off first will be the ones who send most mail.

Thirdly, it doesn't matter what the so-called marketing gurus tell you – your objective is not to build the biggest list you can, in the shortest possible time. The trick is to build a list of people who stay on your list, and actually buy things... and if you deluge them with so much mail they unsubscribe from it, that isn't going to happen.

Fourthly, if you're in any kind of business, online or otherwise, prospective customers are more than just the lifeblood of your business. They're your employers – and if you turn enough of them against you, then you aren't going to be in business very long.

Imagine for a moment working off-line. Would you honestly show up at your boss's home, unannounced and uninvited, three times on a Saturday and three times on a Sunday, each time trying to pitch a separate idea that would be good for you but cost them money... and if you did, would expect you'd still be in employment on the Monday?

Potential customers don't have employment laws and severance packages to hold them back. They'll simply hit the unsubscribe link, and as far as they're concerned you're history.

Prospective customers are like wild birds – if you want to have them eating from your hand, you have to treat them gently and not crowd them. The alternative is, they just take off and don't come back.

Try telling them that you respect their privacy, and to avoid taking up too much of their valuable time you won't mail them more than, say, once or twice a week.

You won't actually lose sales, because no-one's going to buy from you that often, anyway, but at least you just might keep them on your list and open to your offers... and if you can't do that, a mailing list's a total waste of time.

Yes, Internet Marketing Ethics DO Matter

If your definition of Supreme Success involves internet marketing, or if you ever buy information or software from anyone online, this could be of real importance to you.

Some of the internet marketing tools which are currently being hawked around the internet are not just ethically dubious, but downright dangerous, as well.

For example, I've recently been offered a way of putting an advertisement and a link to my site on other people's sites - without their knowledge or consent. Assuming it can actually be achieved, that sounds to me like an excellent definition of hacking.
Well, if it is, then it's against the law.

It's against the policy of every reputable web-host on the planet.

It's also totally against common sense, because the first thing the webmaster's likely to do on seeing it is take it off again - about a nano-second before reporting the invasion of their site to their ISP (their web host), your ISP, at least a few of the anti-hacking sites around the net, and the police.

As you're meant to use this technique to place your link on lots of sites, not only one, that could mean that you end up with a king-sized deluge of complaints against you.

Think about it for a moment. If you broke into someone's house and plastered a poster promoting something you were selling, including your contact details, on their wall, what do you think they'd do when they got home and saw it?

1) Buy your product?

2) Throw a party, and proudly show off to their friends and neighbors the beautiful new artwork that their home's been decorated with?

3) Call the contact number on the poster, and thank you for the artwork you've so generously given them?

I don't think so. Let's try...

4) Call the police, and show them on the poster the details of exactly where to find you.

(Incidentally, don't think that a private registration for your domain will save you. If the police come calling, your registration company is generally obliged to tell them what they want to know. Hacking in any form is taken very seriously now, and is generally linked in law enforcement minds with ID theft, organized crime and potential terrorist offenses. Seriously.)

It's no contest, is it? Well, it works the same way online, too. No matter what the marketers may tell you, it's important you respect the rights of those you deal with.

That includes things like their right to control their own property - such as their website - and their right to block advertising pop-ups on the sites they're surfing.

That means that the current offers for pop-ups that can't be blocked by the site visitor can get you into lots of trouble, too.

Granted, it's much less likely that someone's actually going to report you to anyone for using them - but that's not much comfort if you're annoying your visitors, and they leave your site and don't come back.

It might clash with a lot of the advice you're being given, but the rule's quite simple - if you wouldn't want your site to be hijacked by a stranger, or to find your way to the site you're trying to visit blocked by an irritating pop-up that follows you all round the screen, remember that's exactly how anybody else is going to feel if you do that to them... and if they do, they'll never, ever, buy from you.

As I was drafting this post I got an e-mail from my friend Ric at NoBull.net to tell me that he's starting a new organization called the Ethical Marketers' Association.

It's not a sales site, but a forum where both those involved in internet marketing and their potential customers can express their views on the fairness or otherwise of online marketing practices.

The idea is to introduce a standard that online marketers can sign up to, and customers can trust... and if you'd like to get involved, or have a comment that you'd like to make, you'll be very welcome if you visit the Ethical Marketers' Association and tell Ric what you think.

Working together, we can make internet marketing more trustworthy - which, after all, is the best way of getting, and keeping, paying customers.