Selecting Your Targets

Selecting Your Targets
The Internet experience has a lot to do with personalization, and it's important to determine subscriber preferences. The most successful email marketers are very good at matching past purchase behavior to future promotional messages. Email marketing lists can also be segmented based on Web site behavior, such as links clicked or actions taken. Segmenting the audience provides insights into sales performance and buying trends based on customer demographics.

There are many email marketing tools and vendors, suitable for anything from very small to very large campaigns. Email marketing service providers can automate many routine tasks, such as tracking delivery, dealing with un-subscribes, and measuring open and click-through rates. (The open rate tells you how many people are reading the mail and the click-through shows how many actually take an action, based on what they've read.) Email marketing tools and templates can let non-technical people create messages that comply with the HTML standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and that is something that can help deliver a consistent experience across different clients and platforms. Finally, most email marketing providers have the necessary process controls in place to ensure compliance with anti-spam legislation.

Email delivers market penetration that's much better than newspaper ads, direct mail or outbound telemarketing. Email's reach is even more impressive, when you consider its relatively lower cost.

Delivering the Message
It's not all good news, though, since getting your message through to the target audience is becoming more of a challenge. Both Internet Service Providers and individual customers have grown more aggressive about blocking spam, and legitimate marketing communications are always at risk of being caught in the same nets.

Spam is a threat to the effectiveness of email marketing, both because of volume effects (which lead people to delete mail without reading it) and because of various spam countermeasures. ISPs try to limit the amount of unsolicited email entering their systems, and may inadvertently block legitimate traffic. Legitimate marketers generally require a double opt-in process, so that commercial mail is never sent unsolicited. Despite the spam challenge, though, email is still an excellent communications medium. A well-crafted message, with a compelling Subject Line, will be opened by a large share of the people to whom it's sent.

In the end, it comes down to "deliverability." The content of the message was once considered the most important factor in deliverability, but that has become less so in recent years. Today, deliverability is understood to be primarily related to the reputation of the sender. The sender is whatever appears in the FROM field of the message itself. The message might actually be sent by a service provider, but how the target reacts to the name in the FROM field is the key.