Some businesses will do well by using e-mail lists to communicate with their audience and build a community on the Net. An in-house announcement list or newsletter can be a good vehicle if this is your objective.

Other companies, however, will want to try direct response e-mail campaigns to sell products or generate leads. Exactly how you go about it will depend on your business objectives, the nature of your products, your target audience and other factors. However, most campaigns will have the following factors in common:

1. Planning
2. Determining Your Offer
3. List Selection
4. Creative
5. Testing
6. Rollout

Let's go into each of these steps in more detail.

1. Planning

As with any other promotional effort, planning for the direct e-mail campaign should arise from your business's overall marketing plan. Here are some questions you should answer in the beginning:

• What is the positioning of this product? (What does it do and who is it for?)
• Who is your target market?
• What is your competitive position?
• What are your sales objectives? (Be specific: number of sales, dollar amount of sales, profit margin, etc.)
• What do you want to achieve with this e-mail campaign?

Besides answering questions like these, you will also need to plan for fulfillment, delivery, customer service and other activities that will be affected by the campaign.

2. Determining Your Offer

Basically, the "offer" means, What are you going to give them and what are they going to give you in return? Sometimes the offer is a straight sale: You're going to give them the product with its associated benefits, and they are going to give you money.

It's also possible to structure more compelling offers, or offers that sound like an exceptional value. Perhaps you could offer a discount price for those who order over the Internet during this special campaign. Or maybe you could offer a free premium. Whatever your offer, you should emphasize that in your ad copy.

3. List Selection

Which list or lists you mail to will be determined mostly by the target market you've identified in your plan. Some list providers offer many e-mail lists with varying demographics or interest areas. Some providers own only one list, but they should be able to tell you what the characteristics or interests of their recipients are.

4. Creative

"Creative" refers to the concept, copy, design and format of an advertising piece. Offer and list selection are probably the most critical choices you're going to make, but if you botch your creative your campaign will fall on its face.

Here are some of the creative issues you'll need to deal with:

Concept and format

• What will be the overall objective of this piece you're writing? What overall theme, slant or approach will you take?
• How will your message be structured? Will you use long or short copy? Some marketers have had success with a two-step approach: using a brief message to generate interest, then providing a longer presentation via a Web page or autoresponder.
• Also, what response mechanism will you use? How do you want buyers or prospects to reply? Through a Web page? By e-mail? By telephone? Do you need a form? If so, how should it be designed?

Design

• Most e-mail is straight ASCII text -- letters, numbers and punctuation marks. Graphical e-mail is emerging, but is not yet prevalent. Even with straight text, however, there are some graphical elements you can employ: capital letters, bullets, lines and white space.
• Keep in mind that some users will have their e-mail readers configured to display fixed fonts, whereas others will have proportional fonts. This means that your message will look different to different recipients. I recommend that you view your message both ways to make sure that it looks all right -- and that you avoid trying to create cute pictures in ASCII.

Copy

• Copywriting is probably the single most important creative element in an e-mail campaign. Many books have been written about effective copywriting, so I'm not going to try to cover it all here. Just a couple important points.
• Focus on your offer and on benefits. What's a "benefit"? A benefit is what your product or service does for the customer, what they get out of it: Our product makes you money, or it saves you money, or it saves you time, or it helps you get ahead in your profession, or it makes you feel good about yourself.
• Use headlines to get attention. Grab their attention right away. Include a major selling point or benefit right in your main head and opening copy. Use subheads to break up copy and to get across key selling points and benefits. Many people will read only your heads and will skim the rest of your message.

Think carefully about your choice of a Subject header

• Your Subject header is the first thing the recipient will read when your e-mail ad lands in his or her mailbox. You need to communicate a benefit or stimulate interest, without having your message deleted right away because it looks like spam. Try to achieve a balance.

Include a "call to action" in your message

• Don't be ambiguous. Let the recipient know what you want them to do, and ask them to do it. Include a clear response vehicle and easy instructions for how to respond.

6. Testing

Once you've selected your lists, created your message and arranged all back-end processes, it's time to test. You may have found several lists that match your target market. Each list may have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of addresses. I recommend that you test your mailing on smaller samples, perhaps only a few thousand per list. Examine the response, to see which lists "pull" the best. You can also test various offers and creative approaches to find out what generates the highest response rate.

7. Rollout

Once you have identified responsive lists and workable offers and creative approaches, it's time to roll out your campaign to a larger audience. Be sure to track the campaign and measure your response. Always run the numbers.

Mail-Casting

If you're going to do e-mail promotions, you have some decisions to make about hardware, software and personnel.

For small in-house lists, such as a newsletter or announcement list, you may be able to manage everything with a desktop computer and an e-mail client program, such as Eudora or Calypso.

For larger mailings, you need to determine if your company network is able to handle a lot of e-mail traffic, and if your staff has the time and expertise to manage it.

If not, you may need to hire someone to host your lists. Some ISPs are prepared to take this on. You can also find companies that specialize in list hosting and industrial-strength e-mail list software.

Next Chapter: Finding Email Lists

© 1998-2000, Alfred R. Bredenberg. All rights reserved.