I personally am not thrilled about email marketing for selling products. Most people see it as spam, ignore it and eventually delete it. Because I know that even before I knew anything about marketing I never opened an email offering a product. What is more effective though is not selling a product but recruiting sub affiliates because it's free.
i have the same experience as you, email marketing does not help. Is there anyone for whom email markeing is working?
I can see your point, but in the SEO industry you're exposed to email marketing all the time. It works well for many industries, I think it depends on how you get your leads (i.e. landing page subscription over bought leads), what content you provide and how often you provide it. My two cents.
Email marketing is bread and butter of every marketing guru I know: Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, John Reese, etc They make JVs promoting each other's products and new launches, and earn thousands. And you do not have to be a guru to make those figures. Simply give your subscribers great content, build trust, and then send product endorsements with your affiliate links.
E-mail marketing is not bad, but it requires lots of efforts to run a successful email marketing campaign, if all thing goes well then it can earn good amount of traffic, money for your business. For very useful information about that read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_marketing..
If you send spam, you'll only make enough money to buy spam. Send ham, and you'll bring home the bacon.
Yes it is like push-selling offer. If you don't offer something free, people are just going to ignore the mail.