Email as Two Way Medium

So the line between evil spammers, and normal spammers seems grey to the ISPs, non-existent to the users, and bold to people looking for bulk commercial email.  Google is adding features to positively tag email from people in your contacts, including showing the picture.  One way to get in the Contacts list is to receive two responses.

It’s been 10+ years since people routinely used email responses, most automated emails say not to reply.  Perhaps this will bring back communications.  If companies are used to getting responses via Twitter, perhaps they can bring it back to the “ancient” email technology.

List Building for Fun and Profit

Everyone knows they need a customer list, but most businesses do a horrible job of building them.  For years, we always built features into websites urging them to signup, working to integrate forum sign-ups with the rest of the website.  These days, Feed Burner, iContact, and Constant Contact make it easy to build a mailing list.  Feed Burner let’s you handle subscriptions from your RSS feed and automatically generate the contacts/feeds for your users while you build up a mailing list.  iContact and Constant Contact give you a web widget for your site, let you write your auto responder, and use their service as a mailing service for a small fee (nominal for small sites).

It’s fascinating to realize how much less technical skill is needed for someone interested in Internet Marketing in 2009 as was required even 3 or 4 years ago.  What makes this exciting is that Internet Marketing is moving from a technical field into a marketing field focused on CRM.  Your Direct Mail specialists didn’t have to be experts on printing, just how to source it, your brand marketers could build a branding campaign on television without knowing how to build a video camera.