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The REAL Death Of Email Marketing
By Willie Crawford (c) 2009

For online marketers who have been around for a while, it's
no secret that email marketing "is not what it use to be!"

For many online marketers, conversions rates are a mere
fraction of what they use to be. At the same time, there
are a few marketers that I've chatted with who have
experienced no significant drop in conversions. These are
all marketers who have built incredible subscriber loyalty
over the years.

For many online marketers, the biggest problem is email
deliverability. Their email is simply not getting through.
Email is being filtered so heavily today that often less
than 20% of a large ezine mailing gets delivered.

There are things you can do to improve your email
deliverability, such as run it through a spam checker prior
to sending it out. Top mailing list management systems,
such as http://ProfitAutomation.com , have built in systems
that allow you to grade an email against the Spam Assassin
database prior to sending it. If your email scores higher
than a 2, I personally would revise it to lower the score.

I've talked to friends over a year ago, who often confided
in me that they sometimes sent out emails and got
absolutely NO response. They wondered if anyone even
received the emails or read them.

Many savvy marketers also realized that a business totally
dependent upon email was not a very solid business. They
realized that what they really needed was a database that
contained not only names and email addresses, but physical
mailing addresses. That way, if something dramatic ever did
happen in the world of email, they could just shift their
marketing to direct mail, and still be in business. This is
one of the reasons that you started seeing some online
marketers offering loss leaders on CD or DVD. It gave them
the perfect tool (excuse) to build out their databases.
They knew that email could someday go the way of fax
broadcasts.

Some of my in-the-know friends have also shared with me
that many ISP's now monitor things such as email delivery
rates, bounce rates, and open rates. They use readily
available data, and if a given ISP or third party list host
had a dismal record, they may block ALL email from that
source.

That's pretty scary. I was also told that a few well-known
list management providers were having emails coming off
their servers BLOCKED, or "black holed."

If ISPs are tapping into databases that reveal which mail
servers send out a lot of mail that has very low open
rates, for example, and blocking email from those servers,
that does very well spell the slow death of some email
marketers... unless they move their list to other platforms.

Ok, so I just painted a pretty dismal picture for some
marketers.

When I was in the military, my bosses always told me that
they wanted the truth from me. They insisted that I not
"sugar-coat" the facts. However, they also told me not to
bring them problems, without also bringing them viable
solutions.

Solutions to the email deliverability issue are out there.
For example, paid "sender verification" is one that is
often suggested.

One that I've looked at many times over the years is some
type of direct-to-desktop solution. That's one where your
subscribers install tools that allow your communications to
tap into technologies not even dependent upon email.

The objection always brought up when discussing direct-to-
desktop applications, is that there's only so much desktop
real-estate, so a person can only subscribe to so many of
these independent channels.

Another solution that I like very much is building your
list on a hosted platform, so that communications take
place within the system.

A good example of this can be seen on the social networking
site Sokule, pronounced "so cool." The Sokule community is
built on a platform that looks and feels a lot like
Twitter, except that it's built for marketers, so you are
encouraged to market on the platform. In fact, there are
several built-in features that allow members to monetize
their community membership.

While members of many social networking communities tend to
de-emphasize getting lots of followers, Sokule is
different. Sokule seems to encourage you to get as many
followers (called "trackers") as you can in two ways:

1) They have a quasi-currency, called "sokens" that you can
offer to other members to reward them for following you.
You earn these sokens, and then you offer them to community
members as a reward for following you. In a way, you can
buy followers.

2) They allow upgraded members to direct message ALL of
their followers a maximum of once every three days. That
means that in a very real way, when you build a following
on Sokule, you ARE building a list.

When you set up your Sokule account, you enter three of
your areas of interest. This allows others to search the
database for members with like interests, whom they can then
track (follow). In theory, this means that when you send
out a direct message, your message should be going to
people interested in the same topic.

Just as with an email list, you need to respect your
trackers on Sokule, and provide genuine value to the
relationship.

To check out Sokule, visit my profile page at:
http://Sokule.com/postit/williec

There you can see how you can personalize your profile and
monetize it. The links that you'll notice on the left side
of the page are to five of my pet websites. There are also
links on the left side of the page that promote Clickbank
products. Those links are coded with MY Clickbank ID.

My old military bosses would be proud of me today. Yes, I
came bearing bad news. Email marketing as it once was is
dying an agonizing death. However, I also did as my old
bosses taught me and presented you with a viable, proven
solution.

In future articles, I'll share with you some more solutions
to "the email problem." For now, check out Sokule. Sign up
for a free account and take it for a test drive. It's
quicker to do that at:" http://Sokule.com/williec . The key
to survival in business, just as it was for me in the
military is to be aware of, and adapt to, changing
circumstances. That's something you're now ready to do.
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Willie Crawford has been marketing online for 13 years, and
used article marketing most of that time (writing over 1500
articles). His favorite tools for automatically distributing
his articles, videos, podcasts, and press releases is the
automated submission site: http://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com
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