Let’s face it. It takes time and patience to develop a good e-mail subscriber list. First, you have to make it easy for individuals to add and update their e-mail addresses. Second, every time you e-mail them, you run the risk that they might unsubscribe. Third, maintaining the e-mail list requires that you clean the file (e.g., remove hard bounces), e-mail frequently to keep subscribers engaged and send targeted, timely and relevant e-mails.

 It is not surprising then that I am routinely asked about purchasing e-mail addresses. My standard answer is to be prepared to pay a lot and to get few responses relative to your investment. A recent Limeduck post illustrates what can happen when you purchase e-mail addresses.

Limeduck sent me this excellent comic strip about direct mail and targeted marketing.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

As much as I like to measure and quantify, it is too early to try to assign a dollar value to social media.  Marketers are still trying to figure out how to use social media effectively.  Until they do, they will not be able to measure the impact of social media on their efforts and their brands more generally. 

If you are interested, Limeduck has posted about a tweet up held by a Boston radio station, WBUR, to explore and discuss social media.  Also, Tangyslice has also begun interviewing “real people using Web 2.0 to improve the way they do business”.

If you have been reading Limeduck like I have, you might have read about a Rockport print ad showing shoes that are not available for purchase.  As I noted on that website, this has happened before.  In a Marketing class several years ago, my professor showed a television ad featuring a car that could not be purchased.  As you can imagine, consumers saw the car and went to their local dealerships looking for that car only to learn that it wasn’t available.  Given that high profile mistake, I am surprised that Rockport made the same gaffe.

And yet, just today I received an e-mail that I wanted to share.  In an earlier post, I talked about how some e-mail programs do not load images.  This was in the context of measuring the open rate of an e-mail.  However, the fact that some e-mail software turns images off by default also affects the look and feel of an e-mail.  Here’s what the e-mail looked like:

In the image above, pictures have been replaced by boxes featuring red squares, blue triangles and green circles.  All of the time spent crafting a beautifully designed e-mail is lost if recipients cannot quickly read about the offer(s) and easily engage with the e-mail. I certainly did not bother to display the images in this e-mail.