Speaking of email marketing, one of the main considerations is “value.” While everyone likes a “bargain” it is equally important to include actual information in your email correspondence, and not just promotions. In order to make the information valuable to the recipient, it has to be as specific to the reader as possible.
This means, you need to know enough about the recipient as possible so that you can tailor messages to them that they will find relevant.
And here you arrive upon the first Catch-22 of email marketing. You must know enough about them without invading their privacy and without asking them too many personal questions. Easier said than done, right? Invading privacy is a no-no and asking too many questions will cause them to answer none.
Most “professional” websites learn something about their users in a variety of ways. Some do it with the users knowledge and some do it without. Most websites, in fact, do both. Some non-personal but technical information may be collected by websites you visit in order for the developers to improve their user’s experience by knowing what platforms are most predominant, what browsers their users use, and what monitor resolutions their users use.
Some of the more unscrupulous websites out there may even extract your contact information (your email address) without your consent. If you are designing a website for your business or as a published author, you should compose a “Privacy Policy” that indicates the information you acquire from your visitors. For example, at Outskirts Press, when individuals register on our site, we ask them for the answers to a small number of questions. This is as up-front as you can get. Authors who divulge this information know they are providing us with personal information willingly. Our job, therefore, is to respect that information and provide the author with valuable information in exchange for their information. And we’ll talk more about that in a future post…
President of Outskirts Press 