Day 2 - Effective Email Marketing - 1/27/99

From: <richard_at_tenagra.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 13:50:20 -0600 (CST)

Below is a special mailing to The Online Advertising
Discussion List about the Effective Email Marketing
conference, written by Ann Handley, editor-in-chief of
The ClickZ Network. You will receive these reports in
addition to your normal Online Ads posts/digests.

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Effective Email Marketing: Day 2

Ann Handley
Editor in Chief
The ClickZ Network


If Effective Email Marketing were a restaurant meal, the
waiter would have stopped delivering after a few appetizers.
Granted, the appetizers that did hit the table were well
prepared and satisfying. But still... the plates were a
little small. And my guess is that most of those in the
audience stood up from dinner feeling like they didn't quite
get their fill.

So if day one of IIR's Effective Email Marketing
(http://www.iir-ny.com) laid out the hope and promise for
email as a marketing tool, day two should have offered more.
More in the way of specifics that online marketers could
take home with them and set to work tomorrow. More
discussions of the various types of email vehicles. Or if
not dessert, we should have at least gotten to the main
course.

Several speakers yesterday preached to the choir... trotting
out stats and facts that demonstrated email's tremendous
potential and reach. Granted, most of those speakers who
underscored the basic value of email as a marketing tool
today weren't present yesterday. So they didn't hear the
very same statistics then.

But guess what? The audience did. And the fact is, most of
them were convinced of it well before they walked in the
door yesterday.

Most of them have long been clued into the fact that email
marketing represents the most efficient, least costly, most
precise brand of marketing out there. Or, as Yahoo!'s Laura
Benes put it, "Free stamps. Free printing. The greatest
direct marketing medium ever."

There were a few high points yesterday. Kate Leahy, a senior
consultant with Bigfoot International's Email Campaign
Management group, talked specifics about how best to
incorporate email as part of an overall marketing effort.

"Email," said Leahy, "helps drive you toward an integrated
approach and an ROI-based approach." Don't relegate
email-marketing efforts to a slice of the marketing pie.
Instead, integrate it into your overall marketing agenda.

Traditionally, marketers have measured the success of
various mediums (broadcast, print and electronic)
independently of one another. The impulse, she said, is to
track the effectiveness of various campaigns via
click-throughs, response rates, or listener recall (in the
case of broadcast).

But Leahy espoused integrating all efforts to measure
straight ROI. In her mind, it's a far more valuable metric.

In an integrated approach, email can set the stage for such
a seamless strategy, Leahy said. That'll be especially true
moving ahead, as the vehicle grows in acceptance and evolves
-- like in becoming more transactive, for example. "Email is
one of the solutions, not the silver bullet. But it can help
tremendously," she said.

Cool. But how do you determine the right mix in any
integrated marketing campaign? Leahy left the audience with
several questions to consider:

* What are your goals?
  What industry are you in? (A technical industry, perhaps,
  or non-tech?)
* What products do you sell? (Are they technology-related
  products or decidedly non-technical?)
* Who are your customers? (How do they like to receive
  information?)
* How valuable is each sale and relationship to you?
* What are your internal capabilities? (Can you follow up on
  return emails?)

Fun Facts

Percent of US population who will communicate via email by
2001: 50 percent
Percent of email users who have used email within the past
month: 75 percent
Percent of email users who use email daily: 41 percent
Percent of email users who use email weekly: 27 percent

Wither CPMs?

Just where are email CPMs headed? Currently, they hover
somewhere in the 15 to 30 cents per recipient range, with an
effective CPM of $150 to $300. But Ken Wruk of WebPromote
thinks these prices will go the way of the ten-cent phone
call. "The trend is an increase in pricing. The price for
opt-in lists is going up."

Why, you wonder? Well, Wruk said, "Certainly, there's good
reason for it... the high degree of granularity available
in these lists is what makes the difference."

Email Explained

House file hygiene -- The practice of keeping your list of
email names and addresses pure and clean, so that the names
are deliverable.

RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) -- Describes the value of
an email customer.

Data Mart - Where a marketer brings together all of his or
her data, for the purposes of integrating it.

Rising Rates

What's the best way to boost your rate of conversion from
prospects to customers? WebPromote's Ken Wruk has two pieces
of advice:

1. Test, measure and refine a campaign before you launch it
   wholesale. "Send three equal sets with various messages,
   and see which pulls best," he suggested.
2. Launch a long-term, ongoing campaign. Monthly or
   quarterly efforts pull far better than one-shot-deals.

Quotes of the Day

 "The success of a campaign is in part how you target, but
also in how well you convert customers once they come to
your site." -- Mark Glasco, MatchLogic

"Your mission is to get permission." -- Laura Benes, Yahoo!

"What's so key with opt-in is also opt-out." -- Ken Wruk,
WebPromote

"Customers are fundamentally selfish. If you are going to
take my time away from something else... you'd better make
it worth my while." -- Laura Benes

"You can get really granular, and you can get the people you
know are going to be into your product or service." --
Darian Patchin, Alexa, describing why his company uses email
marketing

"If they can see HTML, send them that. Otherwise, send
text." -- William Park, President, Digital Impact

"Two rules: Don't send Spam. You hate it. They hate it. 'Nuf
said. And secondly, you can't buy or rent permission. You
have to build it." -- Laura Benes

Tchotchke of the Day

I'm not exactly proud of it. But I couldn't wrap-up
conference coverage without awarding a tchotchke of the day.
Unfortunately, that meant scarfing a deck of cards from some
Middle Market Valuation conference that was going on
adjacent to the Email Marketing gig. As I said yesterday,
the email conference is an oddly unusual tchotchke-free
zone... . not a ballpoint pen or canvas bag to be had.

So, without further ado: To the investment banking company
of Goldsmith, Agio, Helms and Company... . congratulations
for being awarded the tchotchke of the day! And my apologies
for it being by default.


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Copyright (C) 1999 ClickZ Corporation. All rights reserved.
 May be reproduced in any medium for noncommercial purposes
as long as attribution is given.

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Received on Thu Jan 28 1999 - 16:11:17 CST