If we ignore for a moment the critics who seek to torpedo anything that remotely resembles email, we'll see that email as a marketing tool still receives great favour with big businesses. Book a flight with any of the well know operators and a useful flow of email usually ensues, keeping us informed of any changes to flight times whilst at the same time sneaking us few discount offers. Within a few days of travel a cheery emails wishes all the best and thanks us for our business. This seems all very courteous and doesn't feel at all intrusive. It does after all save all those pest follow up phone calls or documents in the post. Should it get too much email allows for an easy method of termination.....the delete key. Quite the opposite to the endless dribble of viagra and bogus banking emails you find after your week away in the Algarve. OK the delete key still works but there is a massive differences between email that tells us something reasonable useful and the spam we are all generally drowning under.

Good, well-designed and well thought through email campaigns should not be thrown in the mix with the likes of viagra spam. Far from it, attractive designs coupled with a splodge of quality information can actually be very useful and be more than welcomed by recipients. Obviously a lot depends on proper targeting and profiling of recipients. If we assume mailing lists are clean and measure up to current legislation then organisations should not feel lame in exploiting email. Skilful designers can put together smart looking campaigns in a number of hours, tagging hyperlinks so that important statistics can be quantified further down the line. Not only can we reach clients in a cost effective manner, we can track and measure delivery, open and click throughs, giving us feedback on our return on investment (ROI). Link this with website analytics and we begin to follow visitors paths and behaviours. For those who want to get the most out of their email campaigns its essential that conversion tracking along with post click and post view are properly monitored and analysed. Post click illustrates the actions of web site visitors after clicking through from an email, whereas post view provides details of the people who visited the web site at a later date. By monitoring if a particular campaign delivered on its goal to take visitors to the point of ordering, booking, enquiring etc. email delivers much more than most other forms of marketing.

The number and staging of email is crucial in order to get the best out of any campaign. This is especially true if the campaign consists of several steps. Send out too many too often and you risk alienating the audience. If the message carries little of anything that's useful and smacks of nothing more than blatant marketing, then the recipient may decide to opt-out. Bombard the audience and again heavy opting out may result. If we continue the flight booking scenario we'd expect a confirmation email followed by perhaps a scattering of offers relating to accommodation, places to visit and car hire, to name but a few. As the flight dates approach perhaps an email re-confirming the flight times would be useful. Last minute changes could also be flagged, not to mention a reminder to take your travel documents, passport, euros and so forth. After the event - at a later date, maybe a few more offers relating to similar destinations would be reasonable.

Overdue the campaign and people may start to feel a little abused. It's a bit like overstaying your welcome or constantly knocking the neighbours door to update them with the latest gossip. But if the campaign provides mainly good information, the campaign may make people feel special, even cared for. It goes without saying much depends on the individual, but we need to be cautious and play it somewhat conservatively.

Far to many campaigns make the mistake of never knowing when to stop. They wrongly assume that because we took a short flight with them, we'll want a weekly update of offers. Once the initial courtship is done they should realise that emails should be scaled back. They'll most likely be little need in their services again for quite a while and any regular web user will be checking out competitor prices all over again. Possibly a once a month update is about right. OK, so we always have the delete key, but being too pushing can become an easy turn off. Through good profiling of clients it should be possible to determine the regular flyer from the intermittent flyer and therefore establish whom to best hit with more frequent information.

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About the Author

Paul Coupe is lead designer / developer with Zoom Online.

Zoom Online - Providing total online solutions. Contact: paul@zoom-online.co.uk

http://www.zoom-online.co.uk/e-marketing/Avoiding_the_spam_filter_Email_campaigns_that_win_people_over.htm