Thanks. Those all valid points but has mentioned in the post, your millage may vary.
Now regarding your point about the recipient (firstname, lastname): coming from a different culture myself (fr-CA), I truly understand your concern. In French, addressing someone on a firstname basis is indeed annoying (well for me at least and I am not that old:-). I would be really interested in hearing your alternatives. How to you circumvent this?
HTML email is indeed tricky and I realize I should have mention it. However, there are interesting solutions out there to test both the rendering on various client and its spam sensibility. I have personally used service from Campaign Monitor which provided useful information. Check the following:
I think your concern about up-sell technique could be legit for some B2C markets. However, my experience with B2B (and I have metrics to back my statement) shows that the negative impact of such up-sell is minimal in most situation while being straight positive in some others. I DID get up-sell conversions using such technique. But then again, I think this kind up-sell should remain as light as possible. Not really the in-your-face-billboard type.
This is all about knowing your target audience and adapt accordingly.
I am far from an expert though. I'm a hacker not a marketer :-) I just happen to be interested in such communication, unavoidable being an entrepreneur.
Comments
Thanks. Those all valid points but has mentioned in the post, your millage may vary.
Now regarding your point about the recipient (firstname, lastname): coming from a different culture myself (fr-CA), I truly understand your concern. In French, addressing someone on a firstname basis is indeed annoying (well for me at least and I am not that old:-). I would be really interested in hearing your alternatives. How to you circumvent this?
HTML email is indeed tricky and I realize I should have mention it. However, there are interesting solutions out there to test both the rendering on various client and its spam sensibility. I have personally used service from Campaign Monitor which provided useful information. Check the following:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/design-guidelines/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing/
http://litmus.com/email-previews
http://www.email-standards.org/
I think your concern about up-sell technique could be legit for some B2C markets. However, my experience with B2B (and I have metrics to back my statement) shows that the negative impact of such up-sell is minimal in most situation while being straight positive in some others. I DID get up-sell conversions using such technique. But then again, I think this kind up-sell should remain as light as possible. Not really the in-your-face-billboard type.
This is all about knowing your target audience and adapt accordingly.
I am far from an expert though. I'm a hacker not a marketer :-) I just happen to be interested in such communication, unavoidable being an entrepreneur.