I like the way you explain it...a good message for everyone. Thanks!

Very good info again Cynthia

Great work again, very interesting reading and I loved the humor very simple and very effective in the way you have got your message across using non complex writing and messaging. gai

I love your sense of humor Cynthia, you can make a potentially 'dry' subject actually sound very funny. Great article!

Very nice article Cynthia. Makes me review my website to see if I'm in a selling mode or helping mode. I have just made my contact form for an easy communication hoping to build more list.

Another good and very useful article Cynthia. And many thanks also to Christopher. Thank you guys for the double lesson!

Cynthia, didn't you ever nail this one?! Who else has ever taken email marketing and been able to evoke such a vivid picture that will be long remembered with the message intended. I also liked your comment about being in selling mode instead of helping mode. I would have liked to bring out that point better in my article on building rapport... it's not about being manipulative but rather helpful. That's where these bits of knowledge become the most valuable to us and others. Win/win!

Lovely examples, Cynthia Ann! I've experienced Mail Marketing (from the old days of junk mail) and the environment for promotions has a unique history. At first, there were store signs and door-to-door salesmen, evolved from the tinkers and traders of earlier ages. The purveyors of bibles, magazine subscriptions, encyclopedias, and Fuller brushes received an excellent course in sociology through their door-to-door experiences of the whole panoply of human nature--and this made them experts at 'selling'. Much of this biz migrated to mass marketing when radio came along (print ads would also be worthwhile once the newspaper industry achieved a sort of respectability it never had during its early years) and then TV. But mass marketing is only cost effective when the potential prospects are a significant portion of the population. When direct mail marketing came along, it became possibly to 'target' ones message to a certain demographic (for example, sending snow-ski promotions to subscribers of Skiing Magazine). This was not AS effective as door-to-door, but the cost per sale dropped when using ‘junk mail’ addressed only to ‘proven prospects’. By the 1970s, almost all door-to-door promotions had vanished--and our mailboxes began to get stuffed with mail for 'occupant'. The same process migrated into telemarketing—when marketers bought the same mailing lists (with the same demographic targeting data) with a phone number added. Telemarketing beats Mail Marketing because it is a more intimate contact with the prospect. That same process is eroding almost all the direct-mail and telemarketing advertising and converting it to email (SPAM) marketing. List-owners offer demographic selections based on location, job title, sex, age, ethnicity, and buying history. This last, and most valuable criteria is being debated recently as an issue of privacy (and this was a concern for mail marketers and telemarketers in the pre-internet days). Their response—‘we only use the data to group together potential interested-prospects’ is quite true –advertisers has no motive to spy on customers—they want to be friends! But when the FBI bought up some mailing lists a decade or two ago, people realized that a third party could (and would) acquire these lists for other purposes. So the debate continues. Email marketing can be misleading—one person can use their own contact e-mail list to do a small self-promotion of a product or event—and it won’t cost a dime. But true email marketing on a nationwide scale is only possible in concert with an agency. One of the biggest, Direct Marketing Inc. (DMI), is based in Greenwich, CT. They can help with the copy, the list, the emailing, and the responses, sales or otherwise. They work on commission, so you have to average in their percentage when calculating any large-scale promotion. But they are a reliable source for permission-only email lists in an industry that is historically prone to small, fly-by-night con artists being mixed in with the serious marketer. A serious marketer knows that making and keeping a customer is all about being straight with them, not calling during suppertime, not sending fifty emails to one address for the same offer, etc., etc. Professional behavior is the only presence that will generate return business---and there’s only one thing cheaper than email marketing: customer orders from former satisfied customers. Thus endeth the lesson.

Having been pooped on by birds a few times I understand. I loved the way you tied that in with unwanted email marketing