The Most Important Lesson On Internet Marketing You Will Ever Read
A customer who is in control will be more comfortable doing business with you, and is far more likely to actually say "Yes" to your mailings. In fact, when given a choice like this, empirical evidence shows that around 90% of people answer "yes" to all announcements.
It is almost insulting to say that marketing is about two fundamental things - attracting the customer to your business, and keeping the customer attracted to your business once you have them.
When you move to internet marketing from a traditional marketing background, the first thing you need to do is "unlearn what you have learned". You need to be able to forget everything you know about customers and their response to marketing approaches, because the internet is a new medium, with attributes vastly differing to traditional marketing methods. If you think of electronic mail as "just like postal mail", or "just like a telephone call", you will be setting yourself up for a costly and spectacular failure.
Your mail list should be "opt-in" only.
Think of it this way - would you rather have your customers complaining when they do get your promotional material, or when they don't get your promotional material? The difference between these is how much control you give to your customers.
If you send any kind of bulk mail to customers who haven't asked for it, you can expect to lose 33% of them right off the bat - that's how much customers hate to receive unsolicited bulk mail. On the other hand, if you give them a genuine, up-front choice, you can expect 90% of them to request the material.
Always make your customers feel in control.
Opt-in (permission) marketing by mail is where recipients have chosen to receive mail from a sender. ie. they have given you permission to contact them.
On the internet, your customers will expect to have complete control of their online experience - and if you even look like you're not going to give it to them, it's easy for them to find another vendor. Quite literally, the more control you give to your customers and your prospects, the longer you will keep them.
You may also come across "double opt-in". This is where the user signs up for your messages and then receives an mail asking them to confirm their interest by responding to that mail. If they do not respond, they are not added to the list. Although this sounds great in theory, you can lose up to 60% of your subscribers by using this method of sign-up!
Taking this approach also gives you a significant competitive advantage. Suppose you assume that your customer wants your promotional material, and send it to them without asking. Now suppose your competitor has asked that customer if they want to receive their marketing material, and the customer has actively responded "Yes". Whose message do you think the customer will open first? Whose do you think is more likely to be deleted without being read? Psychologically, people will treat the same thing very differently if they know they have asked for it.
Opt-out marketing by mail is where recipients are automatically added to a mailing list unless they have specifically requested not to be added (ie. they have opted-out). Although your list will probably be larger, your response rate will be significantly lower.
People who do answer "yes" are almost guaranteed to become repeat customers, and that's good news by any standards.
The internet provides unparalleled power to do both of these. Maintaining a customer relationship via the internet is both effective and cost effective - provided you do it right. This power also comes with its risks - it is incredibly easy to do the wrong thing and destroy a customer relationship forever.