Remember email marketing? Collecting addresses and sending out notices about your businesses happenings via email now seems such a sentimental practice when you look at our reliance on the ease of micro-blogging and social media. And yet the practice of email marketing has endured. I often envision it as being pounded out conveyor belt-style while those on the receiving end use their ninja-like reflexes to press the delete button. Much like that flyer that gets crammed in your mailbox for a suspicious Thai restaurant you are never going to try, email marketing continues despite serious reservations about its efficacy.

A bounty of articles addressing the state of email marketing has surfaced online in recent days. Many are saying the marketing technique needs tweaking. For starters, the big trend in email marketing seems to be tailoring our emailed messages and newsletters to fit the needs and demographics of our readers. Much like how search engines “magically know” what to advertise and to whom it should be advertised, company-produced emails look to reach clients with customized content. Relying on high-tech metrics is another trick we can expect email marketers to employ. Big-time retailers and marketers will leave no stone unturned as they rely on metrics to comb everything from e-commerce to social media in order to learn more about their customers. The travel industry, for one, now is looking for new ways to reinvent the marketing crutch they’ve so heavily relied on in the past. Network television, on the other hand, reportedly is scaling back its emphasis on email marketing in favor of aggressive social media campaigns.

But what do you guys think? Is email marketing still an effective tool? What are some of your email marketing triumphs and failures? And what company email do you actually love seeing in your inbox? Sound off below!

It is always intriguing in this new age of marketing who “gets it” and who doesn’t it.

There are brands that you are sure would utilize the latest and greatest in social media marketing, blogging, online PR, intelligent brand marketing but they seem to miss the boat entirely. And there are those who smartly play the whole game and are willing to change along with latest techniques while still remaining uniquely themselves.  So I would like to salute more…

To some, the word “newsletter” conjures up images of a badly photocopied, multi-colored paper affair that is often seen at schools or community centers. These things have been around since the dawn of time and as long as there’s a bake sale or a fund raising bingo game, newsletters are not going anywhere. To others, the newsletter has morphed into a way to correspond with clients via email in an easy to read format that can be dangerously dry in tone. Surviving the social media blitz as well as more…

There appears to be an increase in the popularity of email marketing particular  when it comes to customers who are now welcoming informative emails. As a marketing tool, it seems to be losing its ‘spam’ tag due in part to the policies of many businesses and how they conduct email marketing campaigns.  If a business follows current guidelines, they are marketing to individuals who have opted-in to receive these emails.

Current trends are showing that businesses are starting to show more interest in email marketing. There are several reasons for this, one being the relatively low cost to run an email marketing campaign. Another is that marketers are delivering better content via email marketing, thus creating a better end-user experience. Returns from well designed campaigns are also on the increase with many businesses reporting that email marketing delivers their highest ROI when it comes to a cost comparison.

For businesses selling tangible products, email marketing may well lead to a decent increase in revenues. The biggest problem for many businesses is simply getting started and developing an email list to market to. There are many services (such as Aweber) available to help manage your mail list, however this does still leave the task of acquiring email addresses.

Ensuring your web site has multiple entry points to sign up for newsletters is certainly one tactic that is working  well.  Popular entry and exit points are obvious areas to place newsletter opt-in forms or buttons. Ensuring the sign on process is as quick and painless as possible is also important. Often a name and  email address is all you need to get started.

Email marketing is finding a lot of new friends both in the online and offline world. Brick and mortar businesses are also requesting email addresses and many shoppers are obliging. As a form of marketing, it can be inexpensive and the returns can be sizable.

Yesterday Yahoo! announced New Yahoo! Mail that includes a bunch of new bells and whistles that allow you to connect more and to do more. It’s about time! I recently added a Gmail account to my mail capabilities because I needed features that Yahoo! just couldn’t handle for me. For one, Yahoo! limited emails to 10MB. With the new Yahoo! Mail, you now can email up to 25MB. Yahoo! No more scrunching down videos. No more having to go to Gmail to send large files. It’s about time. Here are some other new cool things that you get when you upgrade to Yahoo! Mail:

• Download multiple downloads simultaneously

• Auto check for messages

• Drafts are auto-saved as you write

• Manage your calendar without leaving your email

• Chatting and texting capabilities built built right into your inbox

• Drag and drop capabilities in email interface

• Tabs to facilitate multitasking

• More powerful search capabilities

• Built-in Evite capabilities (coming soon)

• Unlimited storage capacity

There’s more. To check out the play by play of the live Yahoo Mail demo, read Search Engine Land’s live blog roll.

Don’t expect people to come knocking down your door just because you have a website. The bottom line is you must have products and/or services people are interested in first and foremost. No duh, right? Let’s say you know there is a demand for what you’re offering and you are ready to attract traffic to your site. This is where Brandcasting comes in. Think of Brandcasting like casting a bag of seeds across a vast field (the Internet). Each seed that is cast will need to be nourished and watered in order to grow tall enough to have a presence. But once a presence is established, you will see many iterations of your brand sprouting up for any passerby to come across. The longer you nourish the seedling, the higher and more prominent it grows.

There are lots of ways to deploy intelligent brand marketing online. We’re just scratching the surface here. I haven’t even touched on press releases, banner ad campaigns, viral videos, ppc campaigns, newsletters, affiliate programs, email marketing and a whole slew of other tools a business or an individual can apply for effective Brandcasting.

The metaphor of scattering seeds and then nourishing them is an apt one. For example, lets say one such seed is intended to grow a branded blog for your company. Having the best blog or writing the best entries doesn’t mean diddlysquat unless someone is interested enough in what you’re offering. So it is really important that you nourish your blog with quality content and engaging information and “water” your blog daily, that is, add content to it daily.  Having a good mix of seeds is helpful too. Having a multi-level marketing strategy that employs the best combination of “seeds” may be the best way attract different niche audiences. So one set of seeds may be intended to grow the company blog variety, another seed is intended to create a presence via article marketing, another seed may be intended to give your brand a video presence, and so on. Ultimately, you want the right mix of seeds to catch the attention of the right mix of customers.

Whether you do it yourself, or hire a company like Brandsplat to deploy an intelligent online branding campaign, you have to choose a strategy and remember to manage your strategy as certain milestones are met. Brandcasting can boost your company’s visibility and over time can give your brand a lasting footprint on the Internet. Just remember that it takes time to build your presence online and don’t get frustrated if you don’t see results right away. Cast those seeds, water and feed them and watch them grow your brand into one that has a healthy presence on the web. Happy farming.

According to a recent Adage article, email marketing is expected to more than double in the next five years. How is that possible? I’m already getting enough email to choke a digital horse. Advertisers are projected to spend 2 billion dollars in e-mail marketing by 2014. The reason for the increase is that marketers have figured out that doing an email campaign is cheap, can be easily tracked and will report whether the campaign is working or not in an instant. It took them a while, didn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great if your mailbox could hold a finite amount of marketing mail? Just like in the real world, your mailbox is only so big. In some European countries I’ve even seen neighborhoods that had two mailboxes for each household–one for mail, and one for marketing materials and newspapers. If someone were smart, they’d figure out how to deploy the same kind of two-mailbox system on the Interwebs and offer it to “target markets” so they could sort their mail without having to click delete a thousand times. Maybe I should do it. But who’s got the time? I’m too busy reading emails.