I tend to use the analogy of e-newsletters, when used properly being comparable to modern day stealth fighters with relationship to web marketing campaigns.
E-newsletters tend to be either heavily bogged down with marketing/advertisements, swamped with articles and other non-marketing content or somewhere in the middle. You’ll need to find the happy medium through A/V and multivariate testing and definitely want to make sure you don’t deter potential prospects by littering your content with too many ads and marketing ‘junk’ — emphasis on the later because no matter how well designed your campaign might be from a marketing content perspective, if it looks like spam/junk mail, no one will read it and/or no one will enable images to be viewed if applicable, disallowing accurate open rates from being tracked, etc.
Using the stealth fighter analogy pointed out above, the newsletter itself should really be used as a clever marketing piece — transparently marketing a product, service or trade conference. The more transparent the message is (without completely invisible), the more effective your campaign will be in collecting revenue. You’ll need to keep in mind your readership audience will be receiving the same e-newsletter every week (or other pattern) so you’ll want to switch the marketing pitch around as well so they don’t become completely oblivious. In other words, if someone sees the same thing over and over again, they won’t be as susceptible to noticing.
Rule of thumb: don’t be lazy! Be clever with your e-mail marketing balancing content with advertising while at the same time switching the marketing placement around. You just have to be careful not to change your e-mail template too much during a campaign because it does create brand identity.
If you can deliver quality, original content to your audience, they will continue to follow as a subscriber and look forward to receiving future issues, likewise allowing you to continuously convey marketing messages in a very forward-facing format that arrives in someone’s inbox.
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