question for you about email...
 

So - of those of you that do email marketing for your member sites - I'm talking about emails to members that have signed up for it, not blind spamming - how important do you feel that the emailing is to your revenue?

is it a necessary evil, or is there actual value in keeping your members in the loop?

It's great for upselling them, or promotions.

is it worth what you pay to do it, though? I mean, an upsell is an upsell - but do you think it brings in enough $$ to support itself as a marketing channel?

We use it, and think its very important to keep members informed and updated.

Also to the ones that have not visited the site in a while u can remind them or propose some kind of promotion so they come back.

Important always only White mailinglist NO SPAM

definitely. Do you do opt-in stuff, or just collect emails from your site members?

By registration provide the option wether u want to subscribe to Newsletter

One thing to keep in mind, is that weather they joined your site or not, weather they agreed to get the mail or not, if they complain, then it is SPAM. so be really careful with this.

Is it worth it??? Back in the day I had a triple opt in mailing list. I collected and mailed myself. out of 1000 sent more than 3 hundred would be opened, and out of that I would say we did 30 to 30 sales.

we mailed 4 times a day to more than 300k people.

Certainly. and from what I recall AOL (of all places) was/is extra picky about spam, whether it is or if one of their customers just happens to click a 'this is spam' button.

a 300:1000 is a pretty decent open rate.