Evil Email
Courtesy of Andy Beal , marketers are finally finding a way to use email to market that doesn’t make everyone detest us. I generally stay away from email marketing, mostly because I don’t respond well to it myself. One of the few places it works is when it’s included seamlessly in a newsletter from a trusted source. Amazon does this well, for instance — they rarely email me but when they do it’s almost always to let me know about something I actually want to buy. They have led the way in leveraging the information they gather; information that is submitted for free from its users, of course.
Social networks are an ideal place to turn what is usually an obnoxious way to grow an email list — finding third parties to get users to opt in — and turned it into exactly what it should be: allowing the niche and its alphas to determine the best newsletters that speak to the community, and encouraging the community to sign up. Advertisers just have to find these communities and work with them to find out what content they want, then cross promote or upsell or even sell third party ads in the newsletters that contain that content.
This is just the first step — next step is allowing the members of the community who gather emails to get a commission per email gathered. This allows the newsletter to not only command the attention of a particular niche, but allows the individuals within that community to push the newsletter to other closely related niches, and even give the advertisers ideas about new content to add to speak to those niches as well.
You can all see where this is headed, my evil friends. The final step is allowing the newsletters to easily include content from the influencers as well as allowing different versions of each newsletter to be distributed to different niches automatically based on the source of the original email (and that source’s place in various communities). Throw RSS into the mix, along with competent data mining of open and response rates for various newsletter sections (based on niche interests, source of original sign up, number of downline referrals from recipient and what their niches are, etc), and you’re getting close to where things are going to be — the advertiser no longer publishes the newsletter at all; the community does all the work to push the products in exchange for a cut from the users they originally referred, and because the commission hinges on converting that downline, they work harder to prepare content that persuades those users to convert.
More food for thought,
The Evil Marketer