Sign Me Up!: A Marketer's Guide To Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales

This book provides a very comprheisve coverage about email marketing, such as permission-based list generation, the optimization techniques about the subject line, email content, coupon, etc, campaign metric montoring such as open rate, CTR, bounce rate, etc. Unlike other books, this books is right to the points withouth unncessary stories or lengthy and verbose paragraphs used to strech the length of the book. A very good book for people who have little time to read!

I have a passion for direct marketing, particularly using the email medium. This book had me learning, nodding my head in agreement, and scrambling to add new things to my campaigns (resulting in lost sleep due to the excitement). If you are in the marketing game or are trying to use email to market, you should buy this book. In fact, if you ever send an email to a customer for any reason you should buy this book. Seriously.

I am a web developer. From a marketing standpoint, it was very good. Its audience is someone who has a web site (or any legitimate business) and is looking to turn their "web page" into a 2-way conversation where the business sends emails and the customer responds by visiting the web site. It is written in layman terms. You don't need to be conversant with the internet or HTML or web development to read this book. I read this book looking for implementation details, but instead it is a marketing book. I found the DNS details I was looking for in about 2 pages of the latest "DNS and Bind" book, but I needed both. Sign Me Up! told me what to do and why to do it, and DNS and Bind told me how to do the DNS records I needed.

I don't normally write these things - but I feel like I owe something to the author. I bought this book and another (also on newsletter marketing) - and while I'm not crazy about the second one, I can tell you that I read this book with my yellow marker out. You might go a couple of pages before underscoring something - but then you'll come upon a page (and this is frequently, mind you) where the book pays for itself over and over. Also, if you're in the mode to buy this book, one of the best books I've ever read (on sales/marketing/the science behind it) was written by Paco Underhill and called "Why We Buy." Anyway, you should probably also know two things (about the book "Sign Me Up"): 1) It doesn't have that "get rich quick feel" that some other books in this vein have (thank goodness) and 2) as I write this (Nov '05) this book is current - as opposed to picking up one of the Guerrilla books that doesn't mention the internet because it didn't exist when the book was written). Anyway, great book, you should buy it and cross "newsletter books" off your list.

I read this book because our company has been disappointed with the results from our email marketing efforts to date. Unlike many business books out there that can seem generic and "fluffy," I was very pleased to discover detailed recommendations and examples of best practices throughout the book on key topics such as building our list, crafting our content, and ensuring that our email is being viewed by our customers. The book gave us specific and actionable recommendations for how to improve our results, and we are already beginning to see the improvements! I recommend this book to anyone involved in email marketing.