The Future Looks Bright for E-Mail Marketing

If you haven’t noticed it yet, e-mail is outpacing telemarketing and traditional direct mail as the fastest growing form of business-to-business marketing. According to Forrester Research more than 3 billion pieces of (opt-in) commercial e-mail messages were sent in 1997. Forrester also predicts that nearly half the U.S. population, or 135 million people, will communicate via e-mail by 2001 and the number of commercial messages will grow to 250 billion by 2002, creating a $1 billion market in just four years.

Omaha Steaks told DM News in their April 6, 1998 issue that the one e-mail campaign the company did ,managed by Acxicom/Direct Media E-Mail Campaign Management, targeted a mix of 10,000 addresses from its house e-mail file and 20,000 addresses from Catalog Link (www.cataloglink.com). The click through rate on links embedded in the e-mail message to www.omahasteaks. com was 5 percent. The bait piece to lure recipients over to the site was a free cutlery offer. There was a definite spike in sales after the campaign.

Eddie Bauer’s has done 10 campaigns since September to its house file of customers’ e-mail addresses. Typical click-through rates range between 2 to 6 percent.

NetVital Technologies, a company that provides network product solutions to the IT community decided to offer a free white paper to those who clicked on the URL in the message. At the site, the white paper was a downloadable file. Follow-up would be provided by telemarketing sales and customer service

Working with IDG Lists, NetVital chose e-mail lists from Network World Fusion and CIO Magazine in its search for the IT professional. The campaign generated an 8.5 response from the NetFusion lists and 9 percent from the CIO list. Because of the results from these e-mail campaigns, NetVital shifted 40 percent of its banner advertising budget to e-mail marketing.

An Atlanta radio station, 99X, aroused an unprecedented level of e-mail from its listeners in response to a fictitious on-air personality, Eddie Harsbarger. Promotional E-mail, the station observed, generates 8 to 10 times greater response than any prior interactive medium including interactive voice response, web sites, or postal mail.

To top these results, interactive marketers find that HTML mail, which has the appearance of a web page in recipient’s mailbox, gets even higher results. A recent National Geographic campaign received a 32% click-though rate and netted 23,000 new names.

An excerpt from the special report, Beyond Spam: E-mail Marketing That Works, published by E-Tactics, Inc., July, 1998.