INMA_A01.QXD

When devising plans for e-mail marketing communications, marketers need to plan for:


 Outbound e-mail marketing, where e-mail campaigns are used as a form of direct

marketing to encourage trial and purchases and as part of a CRM dialogue;


 Inbound e-mail marketing, where e-mails from customers such as support enquiries

are managed.

We saw in Chapter 6 that permission-based e-mail is an effective tool for building rela-

tionships with customers online. Despite the increase in spam such that the vast majority

of e-mails are spam or viruses (most estimates exceed 80%), e-mail can still drive good

response levels as indicated by Figure 8.20. This is particularly the case with in-house lists

on which the data in Figure 8.20 are based, so e-mail communications to customers

through e-newsletters or periodic e-mail blasts are today a vital communications tech-

nique for companies. Figure 8.20 shows that the key measures for e-mail marketing are:


 Delivery rate(here indicated by ‘non-bounce rate’) – e-mails will bounce if the e-mail

address is no longer valid or a spam filter blocks the e-mail. So online marketers check

their ‘deliverability’ to make sure their messages are not identified as ‘false positives’

by spam prevention software. Web-based e-mail providers such as Hotmail and

Yahoo! Mail have introduced standard authentication techniques known as Sender ID

and Domain Keys which make sure the e-mail broadcaster is who they say they are

and doesn’t spoof their address as many spammers do.


 Open rate– This is measured for HTML messages through downloaded images. It is an

indication of how many customers open an e-mail, but is not accurate since some

users have preview panes in their e-mail readers which load the message even if is

deleted without reading and some e-mail readers such as Outlook Express now block

images by default (this has resulted in a decline in open rates through time).


 Clickthrough or click rate– This is the number of people who click through on the e-

mail of those delivered (strictly unique clicks rather than total clicks). You can see

that response rates are quite high at around 10%.

5 E-mail marketing

Outbound e-mail
marketing
E-mails are sent to
customers and
prospects from an
organisation.

Inbound e-mail
marketing
Management of
e-mails from
customers by an
organisation.

Figure 8.20E-mail response figures

Source: Doubleclick

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

Q2 02Q3 02 Q4 02 Q1 03 Q2 03 Q3 03 Q4 03 Q1 04 Q2 04 Q3 04 Q4 04 Q1 05

7.5% 8.5% 8.0% 8.9% 8.3% 9.2% 8.4% 8.4% 7.7% 8.2% 8.0% 7.9%

37.6%37.3%36.4%39.2% 38.8%37.1%36.8%38.2%36.0%34.3%

32.6%30.2%

86.4%86.7% 86.5%87.5%88.5%88.2%87.3%88.8%

89.5%89.3%90.6%91.7%

Click rate

Open rate

Non-bounce rate

5 E-mail marketing