You Need An Otaku For Your Newsletter

Here’s how to make your product remarkable, according to Seth Godin – it’s about getting your ideas to spread, and to get your ideas to spread, you must be remarkable so that your ideas are “worth making a remark about.”  Godin uses a Japanese word called “Otaku” to describe what he’s after.  The word has a bad rep in Japan, but is used elsewhere as a slang word for fandom.

So here’s the million-dollar question for legitimate email marketers – how do you turn a newsletter subscriber from your regular site-surfing reader into an Otaku?  Godin says it’s about getting the right target audience, and not about getting 10,000 new sign-ups per week for your newsletter.

Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the obsession with many email marketers nowadays.  What Godin is proposing, is for marketers to sit back and study your audience – the genuine subscribers, not the ones who are just in it for the free whitepapers and perks.  If you start focusing on those who are listening, on those who want to listen to you, you would have found yourself an Otaku base, who will read what you write and help you spread your message.

Now, that’s the very reason we’ve integrated Tagging into our email marketing system.  When we started to redesign our email marketing system to reach the masses, we asked ourselves: What do marketers want?  What do marketers need?  What’s missing in all the email marketing systems out there?  Is it about the ability to send 1 million emails in five seconds?  Is it about the ability to have unlimited lists and subscribers?  Is it about making sure all your emails get to your subscribers and not their spam boxes?

Then one day, Johnny said, “Let’s tag,” and we realized we’d just found the missing link.  Imagine a simple tool that could give you the ability to really understand your subscribers.  You could then target the right people in your mailing lists, ensuring that everyone always receives information that’s relevant to them.  Once that happens, your readers will spread the word.  And here’s how you do that on eConnect Email – by tagging all your links with carefully chosen tags, so that in time, you will know exactly what your subscribers want.

So take some time, watch the video and see how you can relate it to your own email marketing campaign. Again, it’s all about getting the right people to read what you have to say, not about getting as many sign ups as possible for your newsletter.