Skip to content
Danish people are smart at E-Marketing Posted in Digital Strategy, Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk, 3 comments
Published on 14 August 2007

We Danes are not only good-looking, but we’re pretty smart too. Well, actually I’m only half Danish since I was born in Joburg, but I’m still good looking. Smart, I dunno – but I take my hat off to this guy, Torben F. Rasmussen, the CEO of Danish company Retail Internet.

Rasmussen’s a Danish guy who seems to have taken an idea shared by many around the world and actually made it work. He has compiled a bunch of email addresses and managed to persuade the owners of the addresses to agree to receive email newsletters. It so happens that he has 270 million such email addresses. That’s a heck of a targeted list. This kind of marketing is called Permission-based Marketing, and is something that companies worldwide are prepared to pay top-dollar for.

We at World Wide Creative manage the newsletter sends for a list of companies from UK, mainland Europe and South Africa. It is a difficult thing to crack the code of email marketing, but we’re getting better at it. I think the trick is to make the newsletter itself as valuable as possible, and this is not always an easy thing to do. Here are some things we’ve learned along the way:

  1. Put lots of thought into the title
  2. Make the topic relevant.
  3. Grab your audience in the first 2 sentences.
  4. Keep the content short and punchy
  5. Offer something of real value (i.e. make it free!)

By the way, anyone heard of VRM? VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Marketing. It’s supposed to be the future of marketing, the next big thing…  Read about it here.

Read more posts by Mike Perk

Mike Perk

Mike is the Managing Director of digital marketing agency World Wide Creative and co-founder of The Heavy Chef Project. A video blogger who happens to know a fair amount about web marketing; presenting on SEO, Usability and Analytics at digital conferences and marketing courses worldwide. A passionate Spurs fan, Mike also co-hosts the popular football video blog: Free-Kick.tv.

Follow Mike on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mikeperk

Related posts:

  1. How to send a newsletter
  2. Using blog PR to promote your site
  3. Great Viral Marketing
  4. What’s the difference between Hits, Page Views and Unique Visitors?
  1. Perky says
    (August 15, 2007, 8:57 am)

    I would agre that Torbens list is permission-based (which is important) but I wouldn’t say his list of 270 million was targeted.

  2. Freddy Rodrigues says
    (August 17, 2007, 9:59 pm)

    It is when he has profiles on each one and is able to sub-categorise each one into behaviour profiles for his clients, which include some of the biggest brands in the world.

    It’s clearly working for him.

    That said, there’s still something not 100% ‘right’ about this kind of marketing.

  3. Perky says
    (August 17, 2007, 10:13 pm)

    That depends on whether it achieves the objectives does it not?

    That said I would like that database:-)

« This week at World Wide Creative Nic’s Google Analytics Tip #3: »