Advertising Age's Steve Cone recently wrote about successfully using e-mail to connect with customers.
I found these two excerpts below interesting A link to the full article is below the excerpts.
What's the biggest mistake marketers continue to make with e-mail marketing?
It's still too much of a one-way street. Marketers send offers, ask for opinions or do customer surveys and provide no means for the recipient to directly communicate back to them. All types of companies are sending frequent e-mail surveys. But rarely do they report back the results, and they almost never ask for additional comments that will be seen by a company employee and responded to quickly or at all. Remember call centers? E-mail should be no different. E-mail is a very personal, two-way communication -- or should be. But most marketers fail to understand "personal" means responding to the individual.
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What's the best way to keep your e-mail from getting deleted immediately?
Brand yourself immediately on the "from" and "subject" lines. Seventy percent of consumers say the "from" line is how they base their decision to open or ignore. Thirty percent say it's the "subject" line. That's not surprising, and it just reinforces that you should make your brand equity work in those two spots.