Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(2)
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The sub-title says it all: Matt Blumberg's book focuses on newsletters - by which he means promotional emails the recipient actively subscribed to. He doesn't spend any time on unsolicited promotional emails that a company sends to its customer base. Nevertheless, the content and optimization strategies he suggests hold true for both kinds of mailings. Only the list strategies he describes mostly apply only to subscription emails.

Blumberg's style is very much to the point. Some paragraphs read as if there were an exclamation mark at the end of each sentence. He tells the reader how email marketing should be done - and he does so in a manner that's easy to understand, using lots of examples and a clear language. While this is probably the right approach for anyone getting started in email marketing, anyone with a bit of experience in this area would have appreciated more background in some chapters. Especially since one feels that Blumberg omits some details on purpose in order to recommend enlisting the services of an agency - which leaves a bad aftertaste, since Blumberg is the founder and CEO of the email marketing agency Return Path.

That being said "Sign Me Up" is still a well-written, well-structured introduction to email marketing that covers the most important aspects of the trade.

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.