Email Marketing 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is more associated with SPAM, something that you and I would never like to read in our mailbox.

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US$400 million on e-mail marketing in 2006. This explains why marketer still want to give a try, hoping a certain percentage of receiver would like to read the email and then click on the promotional link in it before deleting the mail.

How it is done technically

Technically, email blasting is not something hard. It can be done with most scripting language by looping thru the list of emails 1 by 1 and send them out as individual email (it is a must or else u would have exposed the whole database's emails to all recipients). The only difficulty is to find the right SMTP server that would allow you to do so, which itself is not black listed by most email service provider such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail.

Email Blasting in Malaysia

For a country like Malaysia where technology advancement is slow, the method is still popular here. The standard price now is around RM800 per blast at the database size of around 150,000. All client need to do is to pay the fee and then the "email marketer" will start blasting email with designed content, base on the database that he owned (keep secretly and will never expose to client). Little or totally no info such as gender, age group, geo location, income segment... about the database can be obtain.

Malaysia client some how think that email blasting is similar to the way how door-step-flyer delivery works. They never know it is possible to track the successful reading rating of these commercial email. They also never imagine it is possible to do a more accurate blast categorized by geo location etc.

To know the marketing result, the unprofessional "email marketer" normally tell client to setup a site counter on their destination website, hopefully by monitoring the website statistic, one could tell if his website get sudden hits boost thanks to the blasting. This method is unreliable, inaccurate and deprecated.

Measuring the success of email marketing

Measuring the successful rate of an email marketing campaign is difficult but few common methods are used:

Web Bug

Using an HTML IMG tag embedded in outgoing emails, calling for a small, transparent tracking image. When the client or browser used to display the email requests that image, then an "open" is recorded for that email by the image's host server.

Pros: Email 'reading' (more appropriate to be called 'opening') rate can be track without the need for clicking on links. Notice that not all email marketing campaign provide a URL link to be click.

Cons: Most mail client nowadays has the function to disable image or at least warn the reader about an external image is triggering. Futher more, it required certain level of programming knowledge to implement the tracking script, where most unprofessional email marketer lack off.

Bounce message

What if the email address recorded in the database is obsolete and no longer valid? Bonce message is the machanism used to track this kind of unsuccessful blasting.

Technically, one will need to hook up a script to the blasting email account (FROM email account), then it will automatically analyze the replied email and count the sum of bouce back email. Unprofessional email marketer will never care about this step, in favour to hide the fact that their database is old and not up to date.

Unsubscribe request

Ubsubscribe request can be a tracking method similar like bounce message, to track the unsuccessful/negative response.

While anti spam association requested unsubscribe instruction to be included in the mail, unprofessional email marketer used it in the wrong way. All they did is to blast spam mail out to email address composed by brute force attack like method, then include those email who submitted the unsubscribe request back into the database. In this way, they get to ensure the database is up-to-date and emails are valid.

A better way of email marketing

The old and traditional method - "Newsletter subscription" is always the best. You can ensure your recipeints is always positive about the information you sent to them as they did the subscription themselve.

By integrating with a member database, you can further customize your newsletter system to send email base on your targetted groups of peopel.

Of course, option must be provided to those who wish to unsubscribe your newsletter. Then, you must make sure your newsletter system stop sending email to these group of emails even they are still in your database for some reason.

To protect your brands and accountablity, you should never disclose your members' email address list to 3rd party. You must not use it to blast unrelated 3rd party information as well.