Article Marketing Resources

What drives more subscriber clicks to a comapny homepage, a sales email or an article publication?

I am trying to find out a certain trends in email marketing. Will an opt-in subscriber to a B2C e-publication be more likely to follow through to a company homepage from a newsletter with relevant articles, or a publication with a couple sales offers or free offers?

Public Comments

1. Personally, I would go for the published article. I've been so bombarded with sales email and spam (400 or more every 12 hours or so), that I'm currently have trouble associating anything good with companies that send me tons of email. I'm about as motivated to find out more about a company or product via spam emails as I am computerized telemarketing. Free offers may or may not be tempting - however, I'm most interested in acquiring useful information.
2. When creating outbound email, consider the following: What will communicate the most 'value' in the mind of the reader?' What is most relevant to me the reader? How you define 'conversion' or goal acheivement. In the business, more and more effort is going into communicating directly with the reader, not the generic masses. For example, RoadRunner Sports increased response and sellthru considerably recently by more carefully tailoring the message they sent new customers. I agree that we have all been overwhelmed by spam or overly 'sales' oriented emails and I personally delete most bulk email en masse anymore. I am tuning into rss feeds and podcasts more and reading email less, but when I need running shoes I still look in my bulk inbox for the most recent Road Runner sports deals. :-)