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:
- Put lots of thought into the title
- Make the topic relevant.
- Grab your audience in the first 2 sentences.
- Keep the content short and punchy
- 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.
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3 Comments
I would agre that Torbens list is permission-based (which is important) but I wouldn’t say his list of 270 million was targeted.
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.
That depends on whether it achieves the objectives does it not?
That said I would like that database:-)