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E-zines| Article #77: STATE OF THE UNION OF EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing, advertising, or whatever you want to call it, has taken quite a hit over the past few years. To understand how things have gotten so bad, you first have to understand where email marketing came from and what caused it to take such a down turn.

While history may be boring to many, you have to understand where you’ve been before you can understand where you are and where you’re going. Otherwise, most of what you’re going to read is going to be Greek to you.

Email marketing, in the early days of the Internet was like when we discovered the first cell phone. People would walk outside of their homes, take their cells out of their pocket, call up their best friend and say “Hey, guess where I am?” Of course the friend had no idea what he was talking about so he’d just answered, “You’re home.” And of course the reply came, “Nope! I’m walking down my block.” And of course the friend would say, “Yeah, right.”

Those days are long gone. Now the question is, when your best friend tries to reach you and you don’t answer your phone, “Didn’t you bring your cell with you?” Notice they don’t even use the word “phone” as cell is immediately associated with the word phone.

What does this have to do with email marketing?

Nothing and everything.

Let me explain.

In the early days of email marketing, when the only emails people got were either from their friends online or their ISP, there was no such thing as selling to people online.

Then suddenly that all changed. Email ads started to come. Slowly at first.

At the beginning, this was actually kind of cool for people as they’d see an ad come into their email box and they’d turn to their spouse and say, “Hey honey, look what we just got.”

But then the emails started to increase, especially if somebody went online to a web site and requested information. What would happen is that their email address would be sold to a zillion people.

That’s when people’s email boxes started to get overrun with what we now call spam.

Well, it really got out of control and eventually people starting screaming STOP!

So somebody had to do something about the mess.

Let’s now rewind a bit.

Before things got really bad, e-zines started to rise in popularity. People liked the idea of having news letters delivered to their email boxes about subjects that they were interested in.

But these same people started getting flooded with a lot of stuff they DIDN’T want. It got to the point where they couldn’t find their e-zine emails anymore.

So the complaints started.

Well, long story short, the ISPs had to do something about this mess. So they started putting what we now call spam filters on people’s email accounts. This seemed like a good idea at the time in order to keep unwanted emails out of a person’s in-box.

Except there was one problem.

The emails that the people were expecting to come, didn’t come. The spam filters really had no way of differentiating real spam from an e-zine.

Why?
Because most e-zines, back in those days really were just glorified ads. If you looked at en e-zine issue and a piece of spam email, you really couldn’t tell the difference except in very few instances.

As a result of this, e-zine email delivery started to drop like a rock and so did subscribers. It was starting to look like e-zines were going to die a slow death.

Then things got even worse.

In 2003 we had the Can Spam Act of 2003.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but basically what the act said was that if you were to send any email to anybody on the Internet for business purposes, you had to include a ton of information such as an actual postal address. These people had to be able to hunt you down and nail you to a wall if you sent them spam.

Unfortunately, the Can Spam Act of 2003 didn’t stop the spam problem. The professional spammers still got away with sending junk all around the Internet and the honest businessmen were getting hurt. Somehow this was just all wrong.

You’re probably thinking right about now, why on Earth you’d even want to create your own e-zine. Well, things have changed a bit since 2003. Autoresponder services now have good relationships with the Internet community and can easily get your e-zine delivered about 98% of the time, which isn’t too bad.

So, because the worm has partially turned, we’re now going to teach you how to turn out a killer e-zine and build a substantial list in the process.

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