As most email newsletter programs go, I'm not sure how I got signed up for this one -- but from time to time it drops into my SPAM box along with letters from Nigerian Princes and offers to increase my length and girth... of my portfolio. The problem is, every once in a while, meaningful emails fall in there too and then I'm forced to wade through the garbage.
Ok, look. I will NEVER, ever use stock advice sent to me through email. General common sense would say that any 'advice' sent to a list of probably thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people isn't really a 'secret.'
I have quite a few problems with this email newsletter -- the first one being that it's 21 pages long! That's right, when I copied it into word, at 10 point font, single spaced, this email came out to over 21 pages. Wow... I sure have time in my day to read this! Oh Yeah!
The second of my issues is that big headline -- "One of the biggest profit opportunities of the next 15 years" -- couple that with the tiny "from the financial resource the Economist calls 'an ethical oasis'" -- the whole 21 pages is just a pitch to buy something... but honestly, I can't tell you what.... I did scan the email, and at first I thought, ok this is to get me to buy a stock, but by the end, I'm not sure what they want, but they include lots of bold type and even line graphs.... It's the ol' bait and confuse tactic... very smart, Motley Fool.
At one point, when I was much younger, I actually really liked the Motley Fool -- I remember a stock picking challenge in high school where Motley Fool by far offered the best free research. But now, what a shell of its former self it has become! It would seem like in their industry, market share would all be about content and trust, and here Motley Fool fails completely.
This email newsletter also makes a few of the rudimentary errors, one being little to no tie back with the company's site. In my opinion, stories in email newsletters should merely setup full length stories somewhere else. I don't want to read an article in my Outlook preview pane. Plus all that content that sits in the email newsletter doesn't do any heavy lifting for you in terms of marketing. Get that content on your site, get it where users and search engines can see it -- don't let your email newsletter be where content goes to die.
For shame Motley Fool.. for shame.
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