Last week we delivered a presentation at the IAB ShowCase, entitled “E-mail marketing: Hot or not?” We spoke about Internet trends and e-mail marketing. Where and how to use it? Do social network services threaten its strong position? What is new in technology?

Research shows that marketing budgets in the United States in 2009 will be aimed at email, search engines and social network services. It is significant that funds for email marketing will apply to mailings sent to the companies’ own (not purchased) client databases. The focus should be, therefore, on gaining clients’ loyalty. The methods of building email databases (lead generation) are also important. While creating a subscription form for a newsletter or loyalty programme, we should carefully consider the specific user data we need because lengthy are discouraging. It is a good idea to ask recipients to repeat their email addresses to eliminate potential mistakes and improve the quality of our database. It is a nice gesture to send a greeting email for newly registered users, although as much as 60% of companies do not do that.

We have got email addresses, so now comes the most important part: we need to take care of the content of the outgoing messages. This is when the marketers’ awareness seems to reach its potential. We have pointed out that it is a good idea to optimise the design so that it works with different email applications and multimedia devices such as iPhone or even Playstation.

Another significant factor is to plan our scenario of product purchases. For instance, a company dealing in interior design products informs its clients about a new special offer on kitchen furniture. Should this message be sent to clients who have already purchased such furniture? It would be better to inform them about special offers on kitchen appliances. This is when dynamic generation of email content comes in handy. In the United States, it is beginning to play an important part.

What shall we do if a client wants to unsubscribe? Let us give him the possibility to reconsider this decision by offering a different newsletter frequency. Maybe instead of receiving emails on a daily basis, our customers would prefer to receive them once a week or once a month. In this way we will not lose our opportunity to contact our customers.

We have also mentioned the development of technology, which offers greater opportunities to generate message content automatically (dynamic content), to exchange data between different database systems and to optimise the design.

The extension of the range of competences of email marketing agencies has turned out to be a topical issue recently. Apart from sending newsletters, they have started offering services of building and managing databases, email campaign planning, text messaging a well as organisation of exclusive campaigns and competitions.

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