There is no environment more hostile to direct marketing than the inbox.
The inbox is a cold, unforgiving place where only the hardiest e-mail newsletters can survive. Yet millions are sent there each day, poorly prepared and with little chance of ever being read.
An e-mail's life is cheap, and databases of targets are aplenty, so they are sent out en masse in the vain hope that some small percentage will succeed in their mission.
Most won't make it to the inbox. Many will be lost on the barbed wire of a firewall and many more will fall crossing spam filter minefields.
Once in the inbox, the last of the few will triumphantly wave their subject lines, despite little chance of being opened. Even the ones that do have an average of three seconds to deliver their payload, before joining their comrades in the deleted folder.
Your average sperm gets better odds than that!
Yet there is so much more that can be done to improve an e-newsletter's odds, and stop this senseless slaughter of bandwidth.
Clueless direct electronic marketing is rife. Any professional direct marketeer will tell you that accurate targeting, personalisation and relevance are the keys to success.
Just because electronic delivery has removed costs from the equation, there is no need to revert back to the machine gun approach.
Lack of personalisation means low relevance to harassed and time poor readers trying to clear their inbox. Low relevance means fast deletion.
Unless you are a spammer, you'll have lots of information about your customers other than just their e-mail address. If they are indeed customers you'll know their order history and a bit about their organisation: use this.
Why do easyJet keep sending me information on cheap flights from Gatwick when they know I live in Birmingham?
Worse still, badly designed and poorly personalised emails will shorten the odds on future e-mail getting through too. At best, recipients will simply unsubscribe from your list, or worse still, add your address to their junk filters.
Good usability is paramount for an effective website, but for e-mails it is even more important. Not everyone is using Microsoft Outlook Express to read their mails and may well have images and HTML formatting turned off.
In fact, the more you let your graphic designers work on your e-newsletter the less people are going to read it. Simple text e-mails are best.
Then there are those who build in tracking mechanisms to monitor which of their customers open what. The very fact your e-mail uses HTML to control its layout, and embedded tracking devices will make most spam filters very suspicious.
The internet is the best customer service tool the world has ever had and the e-newsletter the best way ever for communicating with them.
Use it to build personal relationships with customers, not to irritate them to death.
* Chris is managing director of internet consultancy WebXpress. This and other unedited articles can be found at webxpress.com. E-mail chris@webxpress.com.
