Online Marketing and Email

Yesterday, one of my readers left this comment on my blog posting about Day Job Killer:

Am I the only one who finds the internet marketing wizards fixation on email lists somewhat dated? Can they really “harvest” from their lists over and over, or do they spend a lot of time and money looking for new blood? I have this impression they live in a world apart from SEO-PR and organic search.

That's a good question, so I thought I'd blog about it. The truth is, I think email lists are still necessary. Why? It's the classic push vs. pull debate.

The Web is pull technology. Content resides on a web server. It's there whenever you want it, but you have to get it by visiting the site — you're pulling the content down to your browser. Blogs work this way, too, since the blogs are just a special kind of website.

Email is push technology. Content gets pushed out to you and magically lands in your inbox, with no effort or thought on your part.

If you want to have a conversation with a set of potential customers, it's far far easier to do it with email than with a website. Everyone has an email address and everyone reads their email. Convincing someone to read an email you've sent is easy — unless you're an idiot, they'll probably read at least part of the email just because it shows up in their inbox. (This is, after all, why spam doesn't just go away — some small percentage of the recipients read and act on those messages.) Convincing someone to visit your site on a daily basis is harder, because it requires work on the user's part to visit the site.

Perhaps it's better to think in terms of active vs. passive. From the user's point-of-view, email is passive, websites/blogs are active.

This is why pinging services exist, of course, to transform blogs from active to passive communication mediums. It's why bloggers want people to subscribe to their feeds and/or get blog postings by email — again, it's all about making it easy to reach the intended audience, about getting them to read what you're writing.

There are some other benefits to email lists, too. For one thing, they're measurable — you know how many people will read what you're writing. They're also predictable — once you develop a relationship with your list, you'll know how they'll respond. And they're targeted — they joined your list for a specific reason.
These are characteristics that all marketers want.

So yes, the email marketers live in a different world than the search marketers. I don't see it changing anytime soon, either, because email lists still work and will continue to work for the forseeable future. As will AdSense and other web-based money-making systems. And the best marketers know how to combine the two worlds…

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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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