Email Marketing : 1998 and on to 1999

Email marketing has come a long way in just a year. It has gone from being a questionable practice to an accepted marketing medium, when properly targeted and ethically used.

As we draw a close to 1998, it seems fit to take a retrospective look at where we have been, as an industry, with email marketing while also making some predictions on where it is going.

If you were to use a software development term to label 1998’s email activities, the phrase “email marketing was in beta this year” would probably be the best fit. Most of you will agree that 1998 was a year of testing and experimentation with regard to email.

The first milestone for many marketers was a more aggressive and structured effort for the collection of email information. This included collection at multiple points of contact, such as the registration card, sales group, the technical support group, as well as the corporate web site. In just a short time, we’ve seen many companies go from ‘no email names’ to fairly significant numbers, with the associated collection of USPS name and address information as well. From software registration cards to credit card applications, the request for an email address is now almost as common as requesting a telephone number.

But the increase in email information cannot be credited solely to the marketers - the customers played a critical part as well. Consumer attitudes have changed dramatically, with targeted email becoming a welcomed addition to their electronic mailboxes. Overall, consumers have gotten much more comfortable with the medium, since the medium is being used to provide them with benefits. New product announcements, upgrades, special offers, discounts, revisions, cross-grades, cross-sells, order confirmations, etc., they have all appeared in some way via email.

1998 was also a time for the email content/language to be “debugged.” Short messages with clear subject lines were, without doubt, the winners. Up-front identification of the sending company, as well as inclusion of a reachable individual in the closing portion of the message helped reduce doubt and question from the recipient with regard to the validity of the message and offer.

Personalization combined with the inclusion of an 800 number, an email address, and web address also helped solidify the validity of the email. And, most important, the inclusion of an easy opt-out mechanism made the particular email campaign a winner.

The technologies relating to email marketing have had significant advances as well. Robust messaging servers such as Microsoft’s Exchange Server have had several revisions, improving speed, product stability and security. A variety of software packages have transformed from intrusive applications

(whose primary function was to harvest email data from chat rooms) into savvy business tools for ethical email transmission. They have been enhanced with features for accommodating personalization, filtering domains and, most important, applying a suppress file to remove those individuals from the message transmission who have opted not to receive email. Other features include sending each message individually, as opposed to sending multiple messages out simultaneously as a ‘BCC.’ I know that the ethical marketers are aware of which option to select.

Tracking responses and calculating ROI has also been refined during the past year. Deploying multiple mailboxes keyed with each list is one method. Other methods including the imbedding of a URL in the actual body copy of the email. The more sophisticated client-side email programs will arm the URL as an active link. With this, an email message can be keyed with a specific web page. Analysis of the server logs can then determine the performance of a particular email file.

With the growing demand of email marketing, we've also seen the expansion of traditional service bureaus and infocenters, as well as new start-ups, who offer marketers complete, turnkey services for automating email-based campaigns. Custom data preparation, hygiene, and merge/purge programs have been written using 4th generation programming languages, such as SQL, Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, and Powerbuilder, to deal with the nuances of email-formatted data. Web-based interfaces and sophisticated tracking and reporting routines have converted the email medium into a serious direct response marketing tool.

So what is the direction for 1999 in regards to email marketing? It is my opinion that email marketing will become a major direct marketing component as we move forward. We will see the development of more ethically correct email lists, where the individual has been given the option to be excluded from a rental program on the up-front.

Agencies will start specializing in the creation of email-based campaigns, while the corporate web masters develop and deploy back-end technologies to strategically route and track the respondents from a successful campaign.

It’s real dollars and real profits. From the many campaigns I have worked on with my clients, the results were strong enough to revisit certain outside lists, as well as perform continuation and rollout programs, all at the touch of a button. Once again, as direct marketers, we are at the forefront of an exciting new era. It’s ours as an industry to ethically develop, so we can help build relationships between marketers and customers - which is what good Direct Marketing is all about.