Website E-Mail Advertising -
Does it Work?

A brief report from Gwen Lord, Things of Joy 

I did some Website email advertising with eDirect.com during the holidays. We set a record of click-throughs with the company (over 48% in less than 48 hours). However, we made only a couple of sales. A couple more were received in January, but we still have only recouped about 30 percent of the cost of advertising with them.

Because of our response to the ad, they resent the email two more times to try to generate sales. It didn't work. I'll have to say on their behalf that they really tried to help us generate sales. This is definitely an example of "leading the horse to water, but you can't make him drink." One clue, however. . . we used PayPal for online sales. Very cheap service, but those who actually ordered just phoned in their order because they did not want a membership with PayPal. A lesson learned once again. You get what you pay for. PayPal is history for us -- not the proper service for our kind of sales.

Editor's note: This is not the first I've heard about consumer resistance to using PayPal. Has anyone else run into this problem, or is this something that's working for you? 

Izzy Goodman has done a lot of research on this topic and his Web site now has a large and still-growing collection of complaints and horror stories sent by his readers and posted on his YGoodman.com Web site HERE.