Electronic Marketing?!

    The recent Federal Trade Commission-sponsored forum focusing on spam exemplifies the public's growing impatience concerning unwanted and unsolicited electronic junk mail. The forum also brings to light the difficulties involved in pursuing a feasible solution that all parties can agree upon.

At the heart of the issue is the definition of what constitutes legitimate online marketing. Understanding the distinction between spam and legitimate online marketing is important, as numerous surveys reveal that most of us are willing to receive product-marketing material if it isn't offensive or otherwise distasteful. In fact, this increases significantly if there is an additional benefit to viewing the message, such as product discounts, promotions, or free services.

With more than 70 percent of the U.S. population online, marketing groups have a unique opportunity to promote consumer products at a fraction of the cost of television, radio, print, or direct mail. This benefit increases if a marketing group leverages specialized information systems to manage and track the recipients of the message. These applications, which are generally termed online campaign management systems, provide a number of common features, including:

	LIST MANAGEMENT AND RECIPIENT PROFILING: Takes care of recipient list demographic creation and management
	MESSAGE CREATION, MAIL MERGE, AND FILTERING: Tools for creating or submitting campaign messages and tools for list merging with filtering capabilities to target recipients
	DELIVERY SCHEDULING: High performance bulk e-mail servers to submit large volumes of e-mail
	BOUNCE HANDLING: Techniques to handle non-deliverable recipient addresses
	METRICS, MEASUREMENT REPORTING: Tracks message opens, click-throughs, and conversions
	TRIGGERED RESPONSE HANDLING: Auto responds to customer inquiries
	PROGRAMMABLE APIS: Allows marketing organizations to integrate with in-house CRM or like applications
	OPT-IN/OPT-OUT CAPABILITY: Handles subscribe/unsubscribe requests

Key attributes that impact the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns include:

	RECIPIENT TARGETING: Manages recipient selection by identifying certain attributes such as age, gender, profession, income class, etc.
	SYSTEM PERFORMANCE: Messages delivered in a timely fashion
	QUALITY LISTS: These are scrubbed and verified e-mail addresses
	METRICS: These include opens (i.e., did the recipient open the e-mail), click-throughs (i.e., did the recipient click on a link in the e-mail), and conversions (i.e., did the recipient respond, or was the recipient's behavior otherwise changed by the campaign message).

   It's important to note that this article is limited to e-mail campaign management. There are other marketing techniques for the Web, including electronic newsletters, search engines, and banner ads.