Marketers – Welcome to my e-mail.

If you don’t know it by now, you will shortly. With the rising cost of gas, the rising cost of postage, and the rising cost of printing, I am an e-mail advertising advocate. Note that I said e-mail advertising and not SPAM advocate. Frankly, I understand the issues, but really don’t understand the problem. I don’t worry about getting any more ads for Viagra or marital aids anymore because they simply pass into my delete box. I don’t think about attachments, my mail and my firewall dump those as well. I don’t spend a second of my day on them except to laugh at their misspellings and obvious attempts to get past my defenses. That should be a hint to all those knuckleheads who keep sending this stuff. Knowledgeable people are not even seeing them, so save yourself the time and money.

But e-mail advertising – the kind that informs me of new products, new ideas, new companies, and new business concepts – I am for. If you can pass my internal spam catcher / killer – welcome to my e-mail. I would love to know about your company, your products, or even your ideas. If you want to know how to write letters that pass spam muster – hire me.

Now you may wonder what has prompted this love for e-mail advertising. Something that I have known for a long time but really hadn’t thought of until someone put it into perspective and sent me the following comparisons by – of all methods – e-mail.

In justifying working from my home, cutting down on travel, using remote communication – including the latest tool in my line up – FileShare-Pro
(http://fileshare-pro.com), I weigh the cost of things, against something we can all relate to. In this case, it’s the cost of printers’ ink (which I use to use a lot of) and the cost of a gallon of gasoline – another item all of us consume a lot. Someone who knows my thinking sent me the following.

So you think gas is expensive.
Diet Snapple 16 oz $1.29 ... $10.32 per gallon
Lipton Ice Tea 16 oz $1.19 ..........$9.52 per gallon
Extra Virgin Olive Oil ………….$23.90 per gallon
Gatorade 20 oz $1.59 ..... $10.17 per gallon
Ocean Spray 16 oz $1.25 ......... $10.00 per gallon
Brake Fluid 12 oz $3.15 ...... $33.60 per gallon
Vick's Nyquil 6 oz $8.35 ... $178.13 per gallon
Pepto Bismol 4 oz $3.85 .. $123.20 per gallon
Whiteout 7 oz $1.39 ....... . $25.42 per gallon
Scope 1.5 oz $0.99 .....$84.48 per gallon and this is the REAL KICKER.
Evian water 9 oz $1.49..$21.19 per gallon! $21.19 for WATER and the buyers don't even know the source (Evian spelled backwards is Naive.) It’s a good thing we don’t put any of this stuff into our gas tanks.

But the real kicker – and the reason why I love e-mail marketing is simply that someone calculated the cost of the ink at ……………$5,200 a gal. No that’s not a misprint.

Therefore, I did some more calculations and figured that if I did a lot of snail mail marketing - which you will eventually shred, using the above costs as a relative measurement, I would have to raise my rates to over $450.00 an hour just to break even. So will every commercial writer, copywriter, marketer, or consultant in business, which would drive the above prices even higher.

Get the picture. E-mail marketing is saving the planet, sometimes informing you of things you would have never known but make for good conversation, and allowing companies to keep low hourly rates. Now all you need to do is call me and I can show you other ways to think about business, without killing your ad budget.

Oh, one last thing. The biggest voice against e-mail marketing are the companies who do print advertising. It’s a false fight, and I understand. For the most part I agree with them. However, print advertising is not going away, and e-mail marketing is not putting a substantial dent into their business income. It only appears that way, because print advertisers have not yet figured out a way to work with the e-mail competition. They want to fight with it. Here are some stats that will further help solidify my position.

- For every dollar spent on email marketing, marketers can expect an estimated $48.29 ROI. (DMA 2007 dollars)
- Email is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7, compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs. (Shop.org, State of Retailing Online 2007 report Sept. 2007)
- Small business Email Service Provider Constant Contact recently went public and has a market cap hovering around $800,000,000. Yep, 800 million!
- One email marketing industry leader (Bill McCloskey, CEO of Email Data Source Inc.) says email marketing is a $3 billion industry.

-------------------
Gary Clark is a freelance commercial writer whose services span two continents. He has been writing for and consulting with companies about their market communications for over 25 years. His website at http://Write4Me.biz has additional article for use by the business publisher. He can be reached by e-mail at GAClark@Write4Me.biz or by phone @ 719-536-0505. His marketing blog is: http://market-to-sell.blogspot.com/

You are given permission to use this article, provided that you use the article in full and notify me of its use prior to publication.