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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
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(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.
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