Email is cheap - but to get the most out of it, you cannot abuse it or you lose the channel completely

Only marketing channel that customers can permanently turn off by opting out Only marketing channel that customers can report you to AOL or others and have you marked as a "Spammer" so you can't use the channel at all

When it works the results can be astounding
Email is one of the few marketing channels that customers actively request on a monthly, weekly and even daily basis if they value the information provided.

It is also the easiest for customers to promote to other people if they value the information, causing a mass viral marketing effect.

Unlike traditional advertising, it can be tracked down to the most granular user action, providing you with customer research that cannot be bought.

If you take advantage of email marketing effectively, it can cultivate a very loyal customer base that does marketing for you for very little money.


Doing it yourself is at least 2 to 4 times LESS effective
A client in the hospitality industry uses Fluency to create and send monthly emails based on customer response and monthly campaign analysis. This customer also uses Fluency to send a second email each month to the same customer database, which they design in-house and do not use data analysis to improve. The email that Fluency creates achieves approximately $10,000 more in revenue per email than the in-house created email.

Marketers who turn to e-mail service bureaus with specialized expertise achieve purchase rates four times higher than marketers who keep all their e-mail operations in-house.
Source - Forrester Research

Without Tracking, You Might as Well NOT Send
One Fluency client sent emails in-house without tracking for years. Using Fluency's Net Results™ tracker, we discovered

• 60% of the emails were not making it through due to BAD or UNDELIVERABLE addresses
• Client blacklisted with AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and others so that 75% of the emails that did make it through were NOT getting delivered
• Estimated success rate of 15% - was ACTUALLY LESS THAN 1%