| This book is your guide to understanding the full marketing potential and impact that email can offer to you or your company. It strives to broaden your mind about the opportunities this amazing communication channel offers, and it provides ways to redefi ne the strategic uses of email as an effective marketing vehicle. And it also, we hope, conveys some of the passion and fervor that the two of us feel about our discipline and hope to share. We have dedicated more than a decade of our lives to evangelizing the role that email currently plays and has the potential to play in our personal and business worlds. Throughout this book, you will be presented with a plethora of real-world and timely examples of what works and does not work, documents and checklists to help you plan your strategy, and questions that will challenge and encourage you to redefi ne and rethink your approach to leveraging email as a communication and marketing vehicle.
The structure of this book was carefully designed to enable every reader, whether a newcomer to the discipline or a veteran, to walk away feeling a sense of broader understanding and appreciation for email marketing. Our biggest challenge was making sure that all the collective intelligence and insights appropriately educate you in a way that also inspires you to take what you read and build upon it. Just providing simple case studies, examples, and checklists would have been a disservice. Those of you who have experience on the front lines of email marketing know, all too well, how challenging of a craft it is. Email marketers need to understand the strategic elements that drive results and how to avoid the technical faux pas, as well as how to design creative, analyze results, and navigate trends. Email marketing is one of those rare trades that requires specifi c expertise in many broad categories. Therefore, this book offers an organized and unique approach to crafting a successful email program from start to fi nish. As you read, you will fi nd yourself being challenged to question your current actions and compare them to our recommendations. As you apply your skills, you will be able to quickly defi ne those areas that will help you excel. This book was designed with the ultimate goal of making you, the reader, successful in your efforts. We want to inspire you to be the best email marketer you can be. |