I’ve recently been reading Email Marketing: An Hour a Day by Jeanniey Mullen & David Daniels and I’ve found the book very helpful. It could use another edit (lots of typos and badly constructed sentences), but the content is still good and has really helped redefined some of my philosophies on email marketing.

If you are interested in honing your email marketing skills, I recommend you pick up the book. And, while you are waiting settle into the book, I want to share with you an interesting segment from the book, which when understood, can go a long way to helping you create a good, solid email marketing strategy.

7 Essential Truths of Email Marketing

The “truths” below are from the book, but I’ve also added my own interpretation and insight to them as well.

Truth 1: Email has evolved into a cornerstone of our lives

According to Omniture, more than 21 million emails were sent in 2007 — and that’s just in the United States. Of course not all of those were marketing emails. But that’s the point. Email is not exclusively about reading marketing messages. There’s a myth that we receive too many emails. In truth, we receive too many unimportant emails. According to a Jupiter Research/Ipsos Insight Individual User Survey (July 2006), 87% of consumers in the United States cites email as the number one reason for logging on to the Internet. In other words, we are looking for emails, we want emails, we carry our CrackBerries with us to get emails, it’s just that we’re frequently disappointed in the ones we get. If you can figure out a way to send important emails, even if they don’t have an overt marketing message, your recipients will be more than willing to read them.

Truth 2: Email marketing best practices change all the time

At the recent Email Evolution Conference (which I was unfortunately unable to attend), Jeanniey Mullen — one of the authors of the book and speaker at the conference — stated that about 70% of best practiced from 2006 are now wrong.

Truth 3: Any type of messaging done electronically is email marketing

E-mail is short for electronic mail. It doesn’t necessarily have to be received in an email client. It could be a text message sent via SMS or RSS. It can be defined as a message that is sent to a specific individual (as opposed to a web page or a blog, in which it is consumed by more than one person at a time). But it is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep these different channels separate, because they are frequently drivers to each other. In the not-to-distant future, it is likely we’ll be relying on “pesonal messaging” on device and technology agnostic platforms.

Truth 4: Email addresses mean money: Don’t ignore your non-responders

You spend time and money trying to increase the delivery rate of your emails. You spend time and money trying to acquire new contacts for your lists. But do you spend time and money on trying to engage the inactives on your list? Most organizations don’t. On most lists, only 50% will ever respond to emails, but that doesn’t mean the other 50% is worthless. According to research in the book, even non-responsive email addresses are 150% more likely to purchase than those who opt out of your list.

Truth 5: This is not “the Farmer in the Dell”

As Jeanniey and David remind us from the book, the old children’s song “the Farmer in the Dell” ends with the line: “the cheese stands alone.” For many organizations, email marketing is a stand-alone channel. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Web forms, online and offline touch points, searches, trade shows, conferences, banner ads, etc. are all points that an email can be obtained and an engagement begun. Successful email marketing is an entry and exit point for virtually all channels of marketing and can affect (and is affected) by those channels it connects to.

Truth 6: Technology partners often act like military members

It’s been my experience (and Jeannie and David write of this too), that service providers — whether it’s an email marketing service provider or some other service — tend to slip into a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mind set. These service providers will wait for you to ask for a service, feature, or support effort before offering it to you. So don’t wait. If you need something, ask. Push for service and support. You deserve it.

Truth 7: Ignore the rules (follow the law)

“I have not failed once. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”
– Thomas Edison

Paraphrasing Thomas Edison, it is only by making mistakes that we can really learn and do better things. That’s why we look for people with experience to run important things. It’s not necessarily because they know what to do, but they have probably already discovered what doen’t work. This is the same with email marketing. Be willing to experiment, try new things, and accept that not all of your ideas are going to work. As long as you stay within the law, get out there and shake things up!