Tool Box
Issue No. 11 - June/July 2003
Email in the Age of Spam
How to achieve acceptance of emailed marketing material successfully
by Dr David Corkindale
Email was supposed to be the ‘killer’ application for the Internet: this ‘must have’ means of communication caused many people and businesses to get online in the first place.
Once you have an email list of clients and potential clients it is a very inexpensive to keep in touch with them and to gain information from them, compared to doing this by mail or call centre. But has this golden opportunity for mutual benefit been spoiled?
Unwanted bulk email now accounts for about 45% of overall traffic. So, if you have to delete 10 or so ‘junk’ emails when you fire up your browser in the morning, count yourself lucky — some people get much more! AOL now blocks an average of 780,000,000 junk emails, or ‘spam’, a day; this is a 100 million more than it actually delivers.
There are now urgent and serious calls for legislation to curb or prohibit unsolicited emailing. That’s all very well, but if you are a legitimate small business that has something worthwhile to offer clients, wants to use the low cost and personalising capability of email, but don’t have a list of people who have agreed to accept your information that way, what can you do?
Here is an edited case history of how to successfully achieve acceptance and use of emailed marketing material starting almost from scratch. The case came to my attention through a Newsletter emailed from the US. If you are involved or interested in emarketing, and direct marketing particularly via the Internet, I’d recommend looking at http://www.sherpaweekly. com where you can sign up for the weekly Sherpa Newsletters. Interestingly the 1 May edition contains a case study of Jacob’s Creek using a screensaver campaign with innovative twists devised by Groundhog, here in South Australia.
I think this case also presents good practice in marketing: rather than guess what is the best approach, the case illustrates the use of simple experimentation to actually find out which of a ...
