What will replace email marketing if we have to pay for emails?

At first the idea seems logical - we’ll just pay the fees. But how much would that come to? Let’s see. I have one list that has 7500 readers.

Let’s say worst case is 1 cent per email - pretend that all my readers are from AOL or that we’re at the point where we have to pay for all emails that go out. $75. That’s a drop in the bucket if you have a monthly newsletter, considering the returns sending your ezine could bring.

But what if you email daily? What if your list has 100,000 people? What if you have multiple lists? What if some of your users are converting feeds to email broadcasts, the way Aweber does? Yikes. And does that mean the monthly fee for outsourced autoresponders goes up?

That day is probably a bit far from now, but we should start to think about the future now. Here are the top three replacements I’d lean on if push came to shove.

1 - Obviously RSS. Like Rok says, it’s 100% content delivery. I’d rather have 1000 RSS Subscribers than 5000 email subscribers. Why is another topic I’ll get to later.

The issue to overcome will not be dumbing RSS down for the masses. The masses aren’t actually dumb. Consumers will eventually learn the technology if they find it useful. We shouldn’t force them to, but our excuse can’t be that they don’t want to use it.

The way to overcome that whole question will be to create more applications that aggressively sniff out RSS and make it the end user’s dream come true, without a whole lot of explanation.

Besides, you know what Yahoo! says in its RSS whitepaper - it’s like with blogs. People are using RSS; they just don’t realize it.

2 - Call me crazy, but toolbar marketing is going to make a comeback. I’ll have a post soon about how you can get people to add your button to their Google Toolbar if there isn’t one somewhere in the site already.

3 - Desktop and system tray marketing will come back really strong. I knew I should have kept my See You Again Shortcut account active…

There’s also going to be more of an emphasis on blogging - as if there isn’t already. I didn’t list it as number four because it’s not really a replacement for email.

Of course this is in the world where we couldn’t do email marketing at all. My money’s on that day being a bit too far off to start worrying, but not too far ahead to start planning.

Tags: rss, ezine, autoresponder, toolbar marketing, desktop marketing, system tray marketing