Email Has Become Cheapest Way To Sell »
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Sales of the shirt rose 40 percent that week - Emails with quirky tales and discounts, are one reason Lands' End sells more apparel online than any other retailer - $327 million last year, up 37%. It also is why Lands' End now does 21% of its $1.6 billion in revenue online. Since Lands' End launched both the site and the newsletter in 1995, email has become the cheapest way to buy online sales, far cheaper than the portal deals with AOL and MSN. "The newsletter is a relationship tool," says Bill M Bass, a senior vice president.
Mail Campaigns Feature Games, Streams, Coupons - In the late 90s' frenzy over selling goods on the booming internet, thousands of companies threw up a shingle in cyberspace, only to get lost in the crowd. Now a better marketing tool is here - the old technology of email.
In the US, 126 million people are now online, with 105 million emailing from home and 50 million sending email from work, according to Forrester Research. The mail medium is maturing beyond basic alerts of airfare sales or notices of music releases from Amazon.
New campaigns feature video games, coded coupons and streaming audio and video, as well as tracking email forwarding.
Companies poured $927 million into email marketing last year, up 87% from 2000, with two-thirds reporting increased overall sales from their email efforts, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Last year email generated 15% of online sales, up from 3% in 2000.
Email still has its warts, chiefly the preponderance of spam and the risk of spreading viruses. Lands' End still is in the unobtrusive minority, sending out email newsletters only to customers who expressly agree to receive them.
Spam marketers need to cast wider nets as more recipients ignore them. One telling fact: In September customers of Brightmail, an email filtering company, suffered 1.5 million attacks of spam, 10 % of all emails. By March, spam was 25%.
Finding the Email Elite - But email remains a coldly efficient way to sell to existing customers. Emailing a company's own list costs only $1 per sale, according to Forrester. Sending junk paper mail costs $20 per sale.
The key to email is to pick out the elite 10% of internet users who communicate much more often online. When satisfied, they typically share their views by email with 11 friends. When they are miffed, they zap 17 friends on average, according to a 2001 study by Burson-Marsteller and Roper Starch Worldwide. Some 60% of these avid users read unsolicited emails.
Email software from firms such as Responsys and E.piphany is helping companies pinpoint which customers are likely to respond to a particular offer. Using Responsys software, Office Depot sends out personalized, coded coupons to be printed and then redeemed in its stores.
Some senders can now determine which addresses an ad has been forwarded to, letting a marketer know which customers are proselytisers and thus worth rewarding.
"There has to be payoff. If they're giving you information or taking action on your behalf, you need to give the consumer a reason to do that," says Deborah Korono, a director at ad agency DDB Worldwide's Tribal DDB unit, which specializes in email.
‘Whassup’ Mail Boosts Bud - Last year the agency created a campaign for Vaniqa, a prescription cream for removing facial hair. A total 11% of readers forwarded the ad for the Bristol-Myers Squibb product. The average pass-along rate is 2.5%.
A Budweiser campaign encouraged users to go to the Bud site and create their own "Whassup" ad and email it to friends, boosting time spent at the site from 10 to 100 minutes.
The National Basketball Association, during the April playoffs, emailed streaming video highlights to 121,000 fans, using Mindarrow Systems software. Of the 33,000 users who opened the email, 40% clicked through to play a fantasy game, watch videos or buy tickets, and 7% forwarded the email to three friends to earn a free screen saver. Those who opted in went into the database for future email marketing.
"We reached more than 40,000 people, 9,000 of whom we weren't reaching in our database," says Bernard Mullin, a senior vice president at the NBA.
In January, BMW of North America sent 250,000 car owners animated shots of the car that launched BMW in America in the 1960s, as well as a link to a website giving away brochures, desktop wallpaper and a BMW screen saver. The campaign's click-through rate was higher than 100%, meaning that recipients opened the email several times and forwarded it.
Sales of the shirt rose 40 percent that week - Emails with quirky tales and discounts, are one reason Lands' End sells more apparel online than any other retailer - $327 million last year, up 37%. It also is why Lands' End now does 21% of its $1.6 billion in revenue online. Since Lands' End launched both the site and the newsletter in 1995, email has become the cheapest way to buy online sales, far cheaper than the portal deals with AOL and MSN. "The newsletter is a relationship tool," says Bill M Bass, a senior vice president.
Mail Campaigns Feature Games, Streams, Coupons - In the late 90s' frenzy over selling goods on the booming internet, thousands of companies threw up a shingle in cyberspace, only to get lost in the crowd. Now a better marketing tool is here - the old technology of email.
In the US, 126 million people are now online, with 105 million emailing from home and 50 million sending email from work, according to Forrester Research. The mail medium is maturing beyond basic alerts of airfare sales or notices of music releases from Amazon.
New campaigns feature video games, coded coupons and streaming audio and video, as well as tracking email forwarding.
Companies poured $927 million into email marketing last year, up 87% from 2000, with two-thirds reporting increased overall sales from their email efforts, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Last year email generated 15% of online sales, up from 3% in 2000.
Email still has its warts, chiefly the preponderance of spam and the risk of spreading viruses. Lands' End still is in the unobtrusive minority, sending out email newsletters only to customers who expressly agree to receive them.
Spam marketers need to cast wider nets as more recipients ignore them. One telling fact: In September customers of Brightmail, an email filtering company, suffered 1.5 million attacks of spam, 10 % of all emails. By March, spam was 25%.
Finding the Email Elite - But email remains a coldly efficient way to sell to existing customers. Emailing a company's own list costs only $1 per sale, according to Forrester. Sending junk paper mail costs $20 per sale.
The key to email is to pick out the elite 10% of internet users who communicate much more often online. When satisfied, they typically share their views by email with 11 friends. When they are miffed, they zap 17 friends on average, according to a 2001 study by Burson-Marsteller and Roper Starch Worldwide. Some 60% of these avid users read unsolicited emails.
Email software from firms such as Responsys and E.piphany is helping companies pinpoint which customers are likely to respond to a particular offer. Using Responsys software, Office Depot sends out personalized, coded coupons to be printed and then redeemed in its stores.
Some senders can now determine which addresses an ad has been forwarded to, letting a marketer know which customers are proselytisers and thus worth rewarding.
"There has to be payoff. If they're giving you information or taking action on your behalf, you need to give the consumer a reason to do that," says Deborah Korono, a director at ad agency DDB Worldwide's Tribal DDB unit, which specializes in email.
‘Whassup’ Mail Boosts Bud - Last year the agency created a campaign for Vaniqa, a prescription cream for removing facial hair. A total 11% of readers forwarded the ad for the Bristol-Myers Squibb product. The average pass-along rate is 2.5%.
A Budweiser campaign encouraged users to go to the Bud site and create their own "Whassup" ad and email it to friends, boosting time spent at the site from 10 to 100 minutes.
The National Basketball Association, during the April playoffs, emailed streaming video highlights to 121,000 fans, using Mindarrow Systems software. Of the 33,000 users who opened the email, 40% clicked through to play a fantasy game, watch videos or buy tickets, and 7% forwarded the email to three friends to earn a free screen saver. Those who opted in went into the database for future email marketing.
"We reached more than 40,000 people, 9,000 of whom we weren't reaching in our database," says Bernard Mullin, a senior vice president at the NBA.
In January, BMW of North America sent 250,000 car owners animated shots of the car that launched BMW in America in the 1960s, as well as a link to a website giving away brochures, desktop wallpaper and a BMW screen saver. The campaign's click-through rate was higher than 100%, meaning that recipients opened the email several times and forwarded it.