With email you can carry out a variety of marketing campaigns. These are effective campaigns that you do with a minimum of time, effort, and expense.

Email Techniques

Let’s look at a few things you can do with email. This is not a complete list, but it will get your imagination stirring.

Spam

Spam is unsolicited email to a general mailing list (purchased). There are thousands of general mailing lists around, some with staggering numbers. For instance, it’s not uncommon for someone to offer to sell you a emailing list with 10 million names. You need only a minute return on spam solicitiations to make significant sales. For instance, a .01 percent return (one one-hundreth of one percent) on a mailing list of one million is 100 sales. Consequently, spam has an unholy attraction to many retailers.

I don’t recommend spam. There’s too much of it already—obvious to say—and it’s likely to become less and less effective. It won’t enhance your reputation. It requires special techniques to avoid being blocked by multiple Internet service providers (ISPs). It is blocked by antispam systems and software. It’s illegal in some forms and in some places. It’s likely to be illegal in more forms and more places in the future. And there’s a certain ethic that requires us to all participate in the effort to keep the Internet an efficient means of communications. Spam horribly violates that effort.

Nonetheless, there are other methods similar to spam, which are perfectly legitimate.

Opt-In Email

Some of the same vendors that offer general emailing lists also offer so-called “opt-in” emailing lists. Let’s say you go to a retailer’s website to buy perfume. You buy a $60 bottle of some odoriferous liquid. When you go through the check out, there’s a sentence with a box after it. The box is conveniently checked for you. The sentence is: Yes, I would like to receive information on other fragrances.

If you do nothing, you have opted into a mailing list. You have to uncheck the box to keep your name off the mailing list.

According to the way the sentence is worded, you would expect to be emailed only about other purfumes that the retailer sells. But that might be a false assumption. First, the retailer might very well send you emails on cosmetics or even designer clothing. Second, the retailer might sell its mailing list, and then you might get email from another retailer in regard to purfume, or cosmetics, or whatever—supposedly something at least vaguely related to purfume.

In other words, the people on an opt-in mailing list supposedly have some interest in the type of products for which they opted in. How intense that interest might be is another question.

Buying an Opt-In List

If you buy an opt-in mailing list, you will want to make sure that the type of products opted for are close to what you’re selling. An opt-in mailing list can be so vague that it’s practically a spam list. However, an opt-in list assembled for products that are identical or similar to yours can be worthwhile. The receipients presumably will be interested in what you have to sell.

With an opt-in list, you match the advertising to people’s interests. This type of emailing is not spam because it is solicited from website visitors. The solicitation may be weak or strong, auctual or implied, but there is some relationship—however tenuous—between the prospective customer and the products offered. Let’s call this type of emailing direct email to differentiate it from spam.

The Best Opt-In List

The best opt-in eamiling list is the one derived from your list of customers, past and present. It is implied that your customers will be interested in anything you send them. After all, they ’ve already paid you for merchandise. A direct emailing to a purchased opt-in mailing list might work well, but an emailing to your own customers has to be the ultimate in direct emailing; this is, the ultimate in effectiveness.

Direct Email

What does direct email look like? Well, it’s very likely to be personalized. That is, the receipient’s name and other tailored information— from your database—will appear in the body of the email message. (Read below about mail merging to see how to do this.) In addition, you will want to give every receipient an opt-out (unsubscribe), an election not to receive future direct emails.

Other Direct Solititations

You could add to your direct emailing list by contacting eBay bidders on products similar to the ones you are selling and somehow get these bidders’ email addresses. That is clearly in violation of eBay rules if you use addresses to do emailings that attempt to undermine other sellers’ auctions or avoid eBay fees. It’s not so clear that it’s a violation if you solicit such prospective buyers well after the auction is over with a routine emailing . However, in that case it would be spam, which is also an eBay rules violation. Is it a violation of eBay rules if you send direct email to eBay members who have bid on your products but have not won the bidding? You will want to check the eBay rules carefully—keeping in mind that they change often—before doing any emailing beyond your own customers.

What is clear is that you can use direct email with your own customers (winning bidders), at least until they opt out.

The remainder of this section indicates some of the forms direct email might take.

Cross-Promotion

Because you know what your customers have purchased, you can cross-promote accessories and related products. In other words, if someone purchases perfume, send them a direct email that sells them some cologne. The mailmerge in this case would be only for those of your customers who bought perfume. Or, since perfume is related to cosmetics, you might do a cross-promotion for cosmetic products.

Survey

A good way to get marketing information is to ask for it. To do this you might run a survey by direct email. Your returns won’t be high, but you may get some useful information. If you want your returns to be higher, offer something enticing to the receipients (e.g., coupon for a 10-percent discount).

Transportation

Don’t forget that email has the powerful capability of transporting other digital devices. It might be a digital photograph, an audio bite, a video clip , a text document , a multimedia document such as a webpage (i.e., HTML email), a program, or almost anything. This gives you a lot of versatility.

Support

You can provide support for your products by email. You don’t want to jump into this without thinking it through. For instance, suppose you sell DVD drives for PCs at commodity prices. Support for this product could be a high-tech nightmare. And the buyer doesn’t expect it. There are thousands of PC consultants and PC maintenance people who provide support services. And most manufacturers provide support too. Support is not expected from a retailer who sells at low prices. But, suppose you sell voice recorders for dictation. These are sophisticated devices often complicated to operate. A beginner may have trouble using one. Where does she go to get help? There are not many places. Most likely she will look to you for support. And email can be a cost-effective means of providing it.

Newsletter

Do a newsletter and send it via email. If you want to be fancy, send an HTML email newsletter. Or, if you want to be extra fancy, send a nicely typeset PDF newsletter that readers will be likely to print on their computer printers.

Newsletters make a great marketing device. You can make them do almost anything you desire. They can provide information on how to clean or repair products, on new products in the pipeline, on multiple uses for products, on closeouts of products, on accessories, on personnel in your business. etc. The list is endless.

Resources

There are dozens of email-management programs. Some provide the basics. Some provide comprehensive functionality. Try these:

ConstantComment, http://roving.com

Topica, http://topica.com

WorldCast, http://fairlogic.com

Keep in mind too, that many auction management services provide email management software.

It’s the Database…

It could be said to remind us of what’s important in marketing that, “It’s the database STUPID.” Here we’ll stay Smart, and just say, “Even for email, remember the database.”

Your Database

Your database has substantial information on each of your customers. Name, address, phone number, email address, items purchased, and other data. You can use this data to customize your email for each receipient.

Mail Merge

You customize by mail merging. This is the digital process of merging data into form letters (i.e., form email messages).

Take the Data

You export the data from your database in a delimited text file. It is now ready to be used by a word processor or email program to merge into individual custom letters or email messages.

Take the Email

Before you can mail-merge, you need to create a template letter or template email message. In the template are certain codes that designate where certain data will be merged into the letter or email message.

Merge and Send

Microsoft Word has robust mail-merge capability and can do your mail merge quickly with a high degree of automation. There are also email programs designed to do mail merging. Such programs usually include a mail server so that you don’t have to send the mail through your host ISP. (Some host ISPs put a limit on the amount of email you can send as a means of preventing spam.) One example is Fairlogic’s WorldCast (http://fairlogic.com).

The mail-merge function takes the template and merges selected data from one row (record) of data into the template, prints it or sends it, and then repeats for the next row. Thus, it creates a succession of custom letters or email messages.

Mail merging is easy to do and works very well. It’s the initial set-up that requires a little work. After that, mail merging runs practically automatically.

Not Just Words

You can mail merge more than words. You can merge phrases, sentences, paragraphs, HTML mark-ups, and other text into a template. For instance, if you have the URL of an image (and the HTML image mark-up) in a database, you can merge that into an HTML template , and the image will appear in the resulting webpage or HTML email.

Auction Management Services

You don’t need Microsoft Word or WorldCast to do a mailmerge. Other programs can also have built-in mail-merge functionality. When you select an auction management service, you will want to make sure that it can mail merge. If it can, the mail-merge process is likely to be highly automated.

Custom Communications

Mail merging is wonderful. It enables you to send custom communications to your customers, enabling such systems as customized crosspromotions and customized customer service. Whether it’s a webpage or an email message, customization works well for marketing.

eBay Auction Ad

An eBay auction ad is the result of a mail-merged webpage template. You submit your data on auctioning an item to eBay. eBay keeps it in a database. When a website visitor clicks on your title in a listing page of titles, the eBay Web-database application takes the auction-ad template and the data for your listing and mail-merges it into the auction-ad webpage. The auction-ad webpage is said to be created on the fly since it didn’t exist before the merge.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Email is a powerful and cost-effective tool to use for marketing. The more automated your mail-merge system, the more cost-effective your emailing campaign. And remember, it’s a customized marketing campaign.