Andy Owen - Email Marketing 1

Andy Owen & Associates is one of the world's most respected direct marketing consultancies, offering advice, guidance and support in all aspects of contemporary and strategic marketing.

The company has been involved in direct marketing for over 25 years.

In that time, we have worked for clients large and small and in most sectors of industry and commerce. Our vast experience and expertise is not just enjoyed by UK and European companies. We also work in three other continents too.

We create effective campaigns that not only achieve the objectives of the client, but also fit within that client's overall marketing mix, to produce a measurable return on marketing investment.

Put simply, we help our clients sell more.

Our advice is always realistic and entirely practical. This means we will never propose a marketing approach that is difficult to implement or originate creative or copy that forgets how to sell.

In direct marketing, it is all about results.

The experience we have gained over the two decades and more we have been in direct marketing is experience that consistently makes us better at what we do.

Experience that, we believe, is extremely rare.

And, experience that is available to you. What the hell is happening with emails...? I'm getting nearly 200 a day now. It's a joke. I'm growing to hate the bloody things. In my humble opinion, as a prospecting channel it is now dead in the water. The reason is simple. No one is in a buying frame of mind when we open our in boxes any more. I know I'm not. And it seems that most people feel the same as me. I have actually asked the question to delegates at 3 of my recent shows around the world. It seems the feeling is universal. It would appear that most of us now have our fingers poised over the "delete" button when we open our emails ... Once, long ago, I used to look forward to opening my inbox. Not these days. There's so much crap. So much money and time being wasted. It's become a crazy situation. AOL has been working seriously hard and steady to eliminate spam. And the same goes for all the major ISPs. What's more, this area has really been cranked up in the last 12 months, with firewalls becoming even higher... There is a very interesting article in Direct Response about emails. According to this article, 92% of marketing professionals include emails in their marketing mix. 50% said they intended to increase their spend. Well, if they are planning to use emails to communicate with existing customers, I would congratulate them on their decision. It's commercially very prudent. Because I feel very strongly now that this medium can only be effective in this way. However, if they are considering cold emails as a lead generation tool , I would suggest they are all barking mad.....no matter how cheap it is.