I make no bones about the fact that I freaking love permission based marketing, which is marketing wanker speak for email newsletters. Dollar for dollar, this is the absolute cheapest form of marketing you can engage in, and even if you’ve never thought of having a newsletter before, chances are that when we work together, you’re having one.

There are two reasons I love newsletters. One, anyone who would turn down the opportunity to put their brand in front of hundreds or thousands of people each week or month and generate click-thus for their site for pennies is a moron. Two, because these subscribers have opted in and asked to hear from you, they already have an affinity for your brand, product or service. These are essentially pre-qualified buyers, and if you can get them to open your mail and give them a strong call to action, you can pretty much convert the snot out out of them.

Plus I love doing them. I make a lovely looking HTML newsletter if I do say so myself, and the metrics you get from Campaign Monitor are like crack bananas for monkeys. Every mailing is pretty much 24 hours of stats porn, and the market intelligence in those stats is worth 1,000x the cost of the mailing. It’s fantastic.

So when I work with a new client, some portion of the time is spent on the mechanics of building their new subscriber list. People new to email marketing generally have a vague notion that you go out and buy a list somewhere, but in fact you never do this. You build your own list, slowly and carefully, with a combination of cunning and brute force.

The standard “sign up to our newsletter” form on most websites (including this one) isn’t, let’s face it, enormously appealing. If you want people to sign up – and I assume you do even though I do not – you need to help them do that:

• Incentivise People: Very few people want more email. However, many people would like the chance to get discounts, to enter a contest, to get industry intelligence, or whatever carrot you can offer.
• Bribe People: “Would you like to give me your email address?” is not really a winning sales pitch. “Would you like to enter to win a free Wii?” works surprisingly well, however.
• Catch People: Catch them at checkout with a tick box when they’re buying from your online store, and catch them at the till with a clipboard list if you have a retail shop. Don’t be aggressive but make sure you give them an opportunity to opt in.

The best example I have of guerilla list building in action is Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie. Ciara does six trade shows a year, mostly bridal fairs. She doesn’t have a product to sell to brides that would make doing shows worth her financial while, which is sort of a bummer. On the plus side, the aisles are literally crawling with women who are perfect for her mailing list.

So that’s what she does. She parks herself next to a display stand with a champagne bucket and a romantic arrangement of bubbly and fluted glasses and says “Would you like to enter to win a free champagne draw?” several hundred times a day. The first time I saw her do this, she signed up 400 subscribers on paper entry forms, and then nagged one of her brothers into entering them into her database. (Ciara does not have siblings; she has staff.)

This is, from a guerilla marketing point of view, a brilliant result though not entirely unexpected – Ciara could sign Eskimos up for ice. What’s interesting from a mailing list point of view, however, is the unsubscribe rate. Our strategy with these gigs has always been to announce the winner of the bridal fair draw in the next newsletter, so that those manually-entered subscribers are very definitely getting the content they signed up for.  Still, you’d expect a lot of people to unsubscribe when they a) don’t win, and b) get a newsletter they had never seen before and didn’t exactly wake up that morning desperate to join.

But they don’t. These subscribers are such tightly targeted, high-value acquisitions that they stay. They unsubscribe at a rate of less than 1%. Complaint and bounce rates are so low as to be statistically insignificant.

And that, my friends, is pure marketing gold.

I’ll be honest with you and say that most people who are start-ups are absolutely horrified when I suggest not only that they go outside and talk to real people, but solicit them as well. You absolutely can do this kind of marketing online from the safety of your PJs using social networks, but you cannot target it on Twitter the same way you can at a trade show, gig, or conference. You can do a pretty good interest-targeting job with Facebook ads, but your click-thrus will be shit.

I am nothing if not the queen of Do As I Say, Not as I Do, so as a concrete example here’s how I would build my list if I was interested in increasing the subscriber base for the newsletter I have no idea what to do with:

• I would have launched my re-design with a contest for a free Bootcamp session and a Wii, tied together with a marketing strapline like “Get Business Fit” except less lame.
• I’d Tweet my contest once and rely on people with whom I have credibility and karma to re-tweet it for me, then pray it trickled down. I’d also run a Facebook campaign for cheap kicks and reinforcement.
• I would embark on a round of Barcamp talks, Open Coffee rounds and maybe a local tech conference or two. At the end of each talk I did, I’d send round a clipboard for signups and pimp the online contest.
• I’d Tweet and blog about it one more time before the contest entry closing date, and then call and yell at myself for being tacky and embarassing.

I’m pretty sure that with a bit of effort there, I could gain several hundred subscribers for the price of a Wii. Luckily, I don’t have €169 at the moment, so you will be spared from a campaign designed to get you to sign up for my newsletter, and I will be spared from having to actually decide what to put in it and sending it.

And really, isn’t it better when we all win this way?

Photo: ©Rob DiCaterino

Online advertising in Ireland is, frankly, an expensive pain in the arse. There are very few venues where advertisers can directly place ads, and when you’re trying to match the venue to your client’s product so the ad is well-niched, the pool shrinks considerably.

On top of that, advertising driven websites here are selling ad space in their ridiculously laden sidebars at a CPM rate of €10 and up – that’s €10 or more for every 1,000 times your ad is shown. Some of these sites have a click-through rate of .06%, which means that for every person who finally clicks your ad, you’ve paid a whopping €16.66. My response to that is “fuck right off. ”

For this reason, I like Facebook. Facebook is universally reviled for having the worst click-thru rate in the industry at an average of .04%, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. I’m not being charged per impression; I’m being charged per click. I don’t care that an ad was viewed 50,000 times before it got a single click – I care that I got a total of 606 clicks at an average cost of 24 cents each.

Compare 24 cents to €16.66, and you’ll start liking Facebook, too.

For its sins, Facebook allows a very nice level of targeting – country, age, gender, relationship status, orientation, and as a bonus, you can further refine by keywords in people’s interests profiles. That’s a real strength.

It also has a lot of drawbacks, so it can work well for some kinds of campaigns and not so well for others:

• It’s bouncy. The bounce rate off Facebook click thrus is very high. For a client with a bounce rate normally in the 30s, we saw bounce rates in the mid-60s from Facebook.
• It doesn’t convert. Trying to sell product off Facebook ads has resulted in a uniformly abysmal goal conversion rate and the ROI is crap. Non-financial goals do better.
• The billing is shit. Seriously shit. There’s no company name on the irritating daily email receipts, and no sniff of a VAT receipt either.

Having said all of that, I still like Facebook for some purposes. It’s great for:

• Pure traffic. If all you need to do is raise your visitor numbers, Facebook will deliver. They serve a massive number of pages, so even at a 0.04% click thru rate, you’ll see as much traffic as you’re willing to pay for.
• Brand Awareness. You only get charged when someone clicks, so as far as I’m concerned, the last batch of ads I ran got my client’s brand in front of people 742,000 times for free.
• Targeted Ads: If you desperately want to target gay people, married women, or men between 25 and 35 with a stated interest in Battlestar Galactica, Facebook can be very precise within the available parameters.

And frankly, even if Facebook was entirely shite, I’m still not paying €16.66 per click. As one client pointed out, “I’d be better off standing on a street corner and offering passers by a tenner to step into my shop.”