Selling in the Electronic Age: E-Mail Marketing

Before the Internet, direct marketing meant taking your customer list
or buying a list from a broker, printing up ten thousand circulars,
putting them in ten thousand envelopes -- each one with a bulk mail
stamp printed on it -- and sending them out. If you were lucky, then
you got a tenth of a percent response rate from your investment. .In
most cases though, the U.S. Postal Service was the only party that made
out on the deal. Email marketing has changed all that.

Before I get into details, let me differentiate "Targeted email
marketing" from "Spam":

* "Spam" refers to unsolicited bulk email advertisements, often
sent out to everyone on a purchased mailing list. Most people
find it annoying and advertisements sent out on this basis reap a
very low response rate.
* "Targeted email marketing" sends out email advertisements to a
smaller, more select audience of individuals who have already
expressed an interest in a particular type of product, indicated
a desire to receive information about your company, or purchased
products from you in the past.

If you're orchestrating a targeted email marketing initiative, then you
know something about the receiving the emails. You have some
demographics, you know where they live, how old they are, and what they
like or dislike. You are reasonably certain that your audience will at
least open your message without swearing. "Spam" campaigns, on the
other hand, focus merely on sending out advertisements to as many email
addresses as possible, without regard to whether a given recipient is
likely to want what you're offering or not. This is where companies
like S&H Greenpoints (http://www.greenpoints.com) and Mypoints
(http://www.mypoints.com) come in.

Consumers sign up with their programs at no cost and can earn "bonus
points," or the equivalent of "Green Stamps," that are redeemable for
merchandise. They earn points for signing up, looking at certain ads,
or making purchases. The kicker is that the consumer first fills out a
form that indicates their likes and dislikes, what sort of things they
buy, and a little demographic information. They also indicate that they
would like to receive information on merchandise that matches their
interests.

These programs have become immensely popular, if for no other reason,
because people still love to get something for nothing, and are willing
to look at your ads if they think they might get a free knick-knack.
All of that information that those millions of consumers have willingly
provided goes into a massive database and then merchants who sign up
with the programs can, for example, determine that they want to send a
marketing message to all males between 18 and 24 who have indicated an
interest in sporting events. Greenpoints or Mypoints then sends out the
merchants' message to only those individuals in the database who match
those parameters.

Here's another tip: Those that study such things have proven that an
HTML email message gets a much higher response than a plain text one.
Almost all modern email clients are now capable of receiving HTML-based
email and, simply put, it just looks better.