Nick Martin and Zina Manda

Introduction

Over the course of the last decade we have seen great changes in business-to-business direct marketing communications, in terms of both the channels used to reach chosen target audiences and their effectiveness.

At the same time, the principles behind effective direct marketing - what makes campaigns and lead generation initiatives work or not - remain remarkably unchanged.

In recent years, we have seen established principles become even more relevant, and we will seek to illustrate how these can, and should, be applied to the new electronic marketing channels.

Email marketing is still a relatively new and exciting medium. Never before has there been a direct marketing channel that has offered such a low-cost, high speed, measurable and interactive range of possibilities. It is capable of generating incredible levels of measurable interest, response, sales, and - not least - affordable possibilities for customer management and retention.

Email marketing is, however, about more than just sending out an HTML. Whilst the medium presents a range of opportunities to build and develop new and existing relationships with an audience, it also increasingly carries a number of threats for those who seek to use the medium:

• without due diligence concerning data protection legislation;
• without a clear understanding of what does and does not work creatively in this environment;
• without developing a comprehensive e-commerce strategy that allows you to:

o maximise the user experience when they are directed to your website;

o have a clear data capture strategy that provides you with both the permissions and the information you require to maximise relevant future contact with the customer and therefore maximise sales opportunities;

o effectively measure interest, manage response and fulfil against that response.

Successful email marketing will set off a chain of events in any business that must be planned for. This chapter addresses the issues that will arise and explains how to plan for and manage them within the framework of an overall e-commerce strategy for your business.

Current practice and trends

In business-to-business markets there remains a scarcity of good, selectable email sources. However, that shouldn't obscure the real value that can be generated. There has been a permanent shift from postal mailings to email marketing in the technology sector, based on the excellent results these companies are experiencing using this new communication channel. Other business sectors are also increasingly moving marketing budget into this area, particularly where budgets are squeezed or where accountability for marketing spend is high.

It should be noted, however, that in more mature email marketing areas, tests have revealed that moving back to postal mailings after a prolonged concentration on email marketing can yield excellent results. Because the target audience has been receiving less postal mailings, mailers are able to capture and retain the attention of the recipients of the offer, which results in higher conversion rates. Therefore, traditional channels to market still have a role to play.

New communication channels will always outperform others while they are less adopted but, over time, financial returns tend to conform to a standard response curve. More than ever, the challenge for the direct marketer is to find the best mix for their business and for a particular campaign.

The term multi-channel marketing relates to combining communication channels for a better result. For example, an events company looking to fill a conference venue is likely to see better results by using email, followed up by an acquisition mailing to non-responders, followed up by telephone marketing, than they would by using one channel. Whilst this approach requires more organisation to execute well, it is made much easier by using a data-driven sales and marketing software application.

A major development in internet marketing in recent times has, without doubt, been the integration of such software applications into websites, resulting in an improved user experience but, more importantly, better and more efficient business processes. The introduction of new data protection legislation has made it essential to streamline the number of data sources an organisation holds. A single database that is integrated with the website allows you to record and manage user preferences without difficulty.

Despite the sophistication we all enjoy as consumers shopping on the web, B2B e-commerce appears, in general, to be lagging behind. Whilst the technology sector has easily integrated their email marketing into a broader internet marketing strategy, many B2B companies still have a poor web presence and poor processes behind any ordering service. This issue will be addressed later in the chapter.

Hints and tips for effective email marketing

HTML or text?

Emailers overwhelmingly design their copy using HTML. The advantages of this are numerous and obvious - you can create any design you wish reflecting your brand, displaying images of your product, and hide the web address URL within any links behind HTML text or pictures. (Any HTML campaign should also include an alternative text version so that PC's with browsers that are not set to read HTML messages can still receive it.)

However, there are also some drawbacks to using HTML too heavily, especially B2B, where Mardev specialises.

• HTML emails may be prevented from arriving by corporate mail servers if they are too large. It is best to restrict the size of the HTML document to less than 35 KB, otherwise you may find your campaign suffers from a high number of 'bounces'.
• People who have set up their Outlook system with a review panel, may consider a heavily designed, colour rich email to be unsolicited, and treat it accordingly. It is a question of striking the right balance.
• It may be worth considering whether or not you wish to send a text file in preference to an HTML document. Many information services adopt this route, because they think it better positions the email as a source of information as supposed to a commercial offer, even if the reason they are doing it is to drive income.
• For example, Gartner and IDC, two technology research firms, both undertake text emailing as a preference, while Forrester, a competitor organisation of the other two, uses HTML (34 KB in size). As a preference I personally always read Gartner and IDC emails, whereas I do not always open those from Forrester.

What to avoid

1. Blunt commercial offers and enticements

These will depress your response and result in complaints of spamming. The immediacy of email means recipients will let you know if they are unhappy, and make life miserable for your customer service people.

2. Title lines that are promotional, such as 'Win a Maserati for a weekend'

Inducements may work in the consumer market, but they do not sit well with business audiences via email.

3. Product 'puff'

Go back to sales and marketing basics, and ensure your copy is strongly benefit-led, and truly customer-focused. Think in terms of a fair exchange - you're providing an audience with useful, relevant information, and in return you're hoping for interest, response, personal information, and a share of their spend.

4. Widespread use of promotional words

Mail filters will pick up on promotional words, large files and multiple copies of the same emails that reach the mail server at the same time and block them. For the same reason avoid:

- heavy use of 'Flash' graphics

- sending emails bigger than 40KB

- multiple undifferentiated emails to different people at the same site in a single transmission 

Email Structure

Previously we have explained the value of adopting certain specific approaches in relation to structuring and writing copy when executing B2B email marketing. This is truer than ever, as people at work receive more and more marketing and sales messages into their inboxes.

Possibly the most important one, worthy of repetition, is the value of taking an information-led approach. This provides the recipient with valuable information or advice, or identifies with one or more of their business issues. Whether you are selling a product or service this approach works equally well, and in every respect marks a return to benefit-led basics.

As well as ensuring that your message is tuned to the email medium, it is worth deciding on a number of other considerations that can have a bearing on the performance of your email marketing campaign.

10 HTML, Structure and execution tips

1. Avoid some things Web site designers love to do: cascading style sheets, nested tables, and animation.
2. Avoid those fancy things print art directors love to do: reversed type, colored type for body copy, type smaller than 10 points, body copy justified on both sides, type wrapping around a graphic, etc.
3. Stick to the standard Web safe palette of 216 colors. (See below to a link for a list and examples of these colors.) and set the maximum width to 620 pixels, and type to a maximum of 65 characters to ensure readability.
4. Use HTML code for bulleted and numbered lists.
5. Keep the message size between 20K and 40K, or lower.
6. Don't waste precious above-the-fold HTML space on an enormous graphic such as a logo or product graphic. Content filters will assume that it's a porn message and will reject it.
7. Keep the design clean. Think postcard or billboard. Recipients may glance at your message for just a few seconds; most won't study it in detail. They are making a fast click-versus-delete decision, not a reasoned buying or other conversion decision.
   Use your design to move them toward the click -- rely on your landing page to move them to the next stage in the conversion process. (Make sure you always take them to a special landing page.)
8. Don't be afraid to include additional navigation links, especially where these serve to segment types of response
   For example, links to third party reviews, 'find out more' sections or case studies, or sign-ups to ongoing newsletters all aim to capture interest from targets who are not yet ready to buy. They may be evaluating solutions or planning a product launch in the future. For these and any number of other reasons, they are potential customers - but not right now. These links should not 'fight' the main message, but they should be above the fold, usually on the right. Consider testing alternate orders of these links from message to message rather than considering the order engraved in stone the way it may be on your site.
9. Be particular about brand consistency. Use templates. Create a style guide and make sure people stick to it. This includes a standard, unchanging 'from' for all brand messages.
10. Create your call to action as a graphic, not a text phrase, to avoid tripping content filters trained to spot spam-like calls to action. That said, include a text-URL and possibly a phone number as well in the text, so email programs that disable HTML links won't kill your response rates.

Creative treatments

Design your email piece with your audience in mind.

This may mean a simply executed treatment, possibly no more than basic ordinary text if the offer is technical and related to a practical audience, e.g. software developers. This target group may respond better to this approach because it is not obviously promotional which would be a turn-off for this target group.

Fig. 1. Simple creative appeals to certain audiences

Create a subject line that connects with the recipient, which is likely to intrigue them or clearly states up-front value, all good reasons for them to open up the email.

Think about what the recipient will see first when they open their email, or what they are likely to see first in a preview panel within Outlook - the de-facto business standard. If you have a recognised business brand, display it high up on the HTML page.

5 Copywriting tips to increase response:

Be disciplined. It's common for marketers to toss every single product feature and benefit into an email. That's overwhelming. Testing has proven the opposite approach is more effective. Pick a single theme and stick to it. Prioritize. People don't read emails; they skim them. Your single theme should hit them over the head when they first open the email.

1. Keep your copy punchy and active. Avoid flowery language. Use a lot of bullets and verbs.
2. Avoid exclamation marks. They act as a flag for spam content filters. (Also, if you're using a lot of exclamation points, you won't impress recipients. It just looks loud and desperate.)
3. Test your copy against content filters prior to sending (most email broadcast firms now offer this as part of their service) to see which words may get your message stopped as spam. (By the way, your landing page is a great place to use words such as 'guaranteed', 'savings', 'free', and 'survey' that often trigger spam filters if they are used in the body of the email itself. You may have to divide your copy to conquer.)
4. Personalise as much as you can; readers will skim more slowly, paying more attention if you do. However, the more your personalise, the greater the importance of a data-driven approach to personalisation.
   For example, you do not want to send an offer of a new PC to someone who, only three months earlier, bought the less powerful version at a higher price! Far better to offer add-ons and services that build up the value of the relationship. To do this requires a totally integrated customer view, and a thoroughly thought-through set of campaigning rules that gives selection and exclusion of customers and prospects from your email-based campaigns.

Testing

Testing via email is essential and inexpensive. It allows you to test different elements within your communication including the effectiveness of a subject line, the message content and the creative approach. The fundamentals of testing are to test one variable at a time, and ensure that all other variables, such as the audience targeted, are as consistent as possible.

E-marketing can also be of real value for 'pre-tests' of content to be sent via other media. For example, testing different propositions, each within their own email or split into different paragraphs with their own embedded links, will enable you to see if there are substantial differences in responsiveness to each proposition. Given the importance of not including too many propositions in the same pack, this is a new and low-cost tool available to the conscientious marketing professional that saves a great deal of time.

Once the testing process has determined which email treatment and content is the most effective, don't stop there. Nominate the best HTML as your 'champion', and continue to test over time, creating 'challengers' at each opportunity, both to find effective new sources of prospects, and also to see if you can improve on the results demonstrated by your 'champion'.

Testing Case Study

Economist.com used testing to great effect for their Xmas campaign.

This was a global campaign with 400,000 email addresses being targeted. All regions were sent a version which opened 'Subscribe and you shall receive', apart from the US, where a second version was sent to 50% of the list.

Different subject lines were tested for each creative:

Version 1: 'Subscribe and you shall receive' with the subject line: A generous offering from Economist.com

Version 2: 'Would you like to sit next to you at dinner' had the subject line: Subscribe now and save $122!

Version 1: open rate 32%, click thru on opened 2.6% conversion to sale 4%

Version 2: open rate 25%, click thru on opened 8%, conversion to sale 2%

Version two was more successful, for the simple reason that the treatment used was a much more effective call to action and generated more than 3 times the click-throughs of version 1. However, the subject line associated with version 1 generated greater initial interest, though arguably not significant enough a difference to run with the combination until further testing was done.

Figure 2: The winning Economist test.

Permission and best practise

On 11th December 2004, The Electronic Communications and Data Privacy Regulations were passed into law by an Act of Parliament, repealing the 1997 Telecommunications Directive and the 1999 Data Protection and Privacy Regulations.

This new set of regulations applies the law according to who pays for the telephone connection.

'Individual Subscribers' are defined as residential subscribers (consumers at their homes), sole traders and partnerships and individuals whilst at their place of work, employed by sole traders and partnerships.

'Corporate Subscribers' are defined as legally incorporated bodies including PLC's, Limited companies, government departments, universities and hospitals etc.

Unsolicited e-mail direct marketing messages may no longer be sent to 'individual subscribers'.

Consent must be explicit (opt-in) unless:

• personal data was collected 'in the course of a sale or negotiations for a sale' and
• only similar products and services are being marketed, and
• a clear opt-out opportunity was offered at point of data collection.

The phrase 'in the course of a sale or negotiations for a sale' does not mean that a sale has taken place. It simply implies that an enquiry has been made and that the individual concerned has entered two way dialogue with a view to a relationship or a purchase.

Measuring response

Click-through rates from email marketing activity can be exceptionally high. Some of the best campaigns we run regularly achieve click through rates in high single or double digits.

Make sure, however, that you are clear on your website strategy in terms of lead handling, so that the landing page from the track-able links set up within your email has a strategy for converting the initial potential interest into business.

Make it easy for those people who click through to your web site to take the logical next step, once they have absorbed the additional information you wish them to review.

This means repeating the call-to-action first used in your email on the landing page itself, and in association with the data capture form where you ask responders to fill in their details.

There are ways in which you can track what happens to people who initially respond to your email marketing campaign beyond the first click, both by use of a 'tagging' page and through the use of campaign response codes.

Using a sales and marketing web software application, such as MarketDeveloper, also enables you to automate the management of the response to the most appropriate person within your organisation. Executable web response forms are given free normally, and these can be coded so that, based on territory or market sector, the response is automatically added as an enquiry to the database, for 'real-time' follow up.

The key point to remember is that initial click-through rates do not automatically mean a successful campaign, and a click-through does not necessarily equate to a response.

Targeted prospects are best

Whilst appreciating that many email lists are difficult or impossible to profile beyond inferring a type of person by the web site source where they registered, there are some good targeted lists. These should be at the top of your shopping list. Whilst they are more expensive, the premium you pay is worth every penny.

Not only are conversion rates likely to be better, since the propensity of the offer to be highly relevant is increased proportionally to the effective descriptive profiling of your target market, but the risk of brand damage and complaints are greatly reduced if the possibility of your communication being confused with spam is minimised in this way.

Relevancy is the most fundamental of all criteria for success. The more relevant the offer, the better the ROI, and the less opt outs from future communications will be experienced. You can only be relevant if your communications are properly targeted.

How are B2B communications affected?

Individuals working for limited companies, PLC's, universities and in government departments are not covered by the new regulations. You can only continue sending unsolicited mail to 'corporate subscribers' under the following conditions:

• you must clearly identify the sender in the 'from' field;
• it should be clear from the subject line that it is an advertisement;
• you must supply a return postal address and, preferably, also an e-mail address;
• you must provide the opportunity for the recipient to opt out.

This is fine if you can clearly identify the sole traders and partnerships within your database. However, if you can't, and you have no pre-existing relationship with the individuals concerned, then you will need to seek opt-in, off-line, before you contact them via e-mail.

Whilst there is little or no case law yet to reinforce the implementation of the regulations in this situation, all advertisers are subject to the CAP (Committee for Advertising Practices) code which is administered by the Advertising Standards Authority.

Last year they received a complaint from an individual subscriber who claimed that they had received unsolicited e-mail from a company called the Training Guild. This company had mailed a training offer out, using a third-party list which they believed to be entirely B2B. However, the list contained at least one individual (consumer), under the terms of the code. The complaint was upheld because it was felt that the advertiser had not exercised due diligence in renting the list.

Whilst there no fines were levied for this first offence under the code, stricter sanctions are likely to follow. It would appear that obtaining an opt-in is the preferable approach and provides the greatest scope for ongoing use.

Implied versus explicit consent

What is meant by the word 'consent'? Currently, where an email address is given in the context of proper notification and consent criteria, the act of providing an email is explicit consent. In other words, in opting to give email address details, the individual is also giving their permission for a business to use this address for the purposes communicated. Opting out of those same purposes communicated is implied consent. The clearer and more specific the notification and the mechanism for doing so, the stronger the implied form of consent can be said to be.

A 'belt and braces' approach may also include a specific clause for a purpose that the business wishes to highlight in particular, especially where it is a purpose other than the one the customer has transacted on, in association with a device (such as a tick box) to ensure that intentions for use are clear.

Where data is collected over the Internet, the submit button is often used as the device to confirm that the individual has signed up to receiving communications - a practice that started in the USA. However. this may only work as long as notification is clear, and a right to object is provided at all times (and does not involve a game of 'hunt the needle in the haystack').

Double opt-in, where implied consent is followed up by a confirmatory email, is no substitute for being clear in the first place. Although it is undeniably, a sensible step to introduce into web-based data collection. However, mechanisms should not be used as a smokescreen for poor or non-existent notification.

Spam

As email has grown to become the central message handling system for business people, so has sensitivity grown of the potential intrusiveness that general messages can represent, and the risk of being perceived as 'spam'. Spam stands for Simultaneously Published Advertising Message, and refers to unsolicited, untargeted (and therefore 'mass') email. We have already discussed the legislative efforts to curtail spam and compliance with the law will minimise the risk that your marketing communications will fall into this category. However, it is important to be aware of commercial services offering to stop spam and of future developments in the war against spam.

Unfortunately, the benefits afforded legitimate business by email marketing have provided opportunities for less legitimate and indeed criminal elements. There are no national borders to cross on the internet and to date the US has been largely to blame for the large number of irrelevant, unpleasant and scam emails that arrive daily in a company's inbox. With 83% of mail traffic on the internet now considered to be spam, what future is there for this important business tool?

Legislators have attempted to regulate a global medium on a national basis. Whilst legislation has created some useful guidelines for legitimate practitioners, it seems do be doing nothing to impede the cowboys who route their messages via a variety of servers across international borders making it almost impossible, until now, to track down their origination. A number of commercial enterprises have stepped into the breach, some seeking to protect the Internet's integrity, others simply seeking to make money.

The Internet Service Providers, who provide access to the highway have been the first to be blamed for the levels of spam on the internet. Members of ISPA UK are required to provide their users with advice and tools available to protect privacy, filter content and minimise spam. A question mark resides over the efficacy of the tools that have been available to date.

In the beginning, methods were at their crudest with companies like SPAMCOP advising ISP's to shut down company websites based on a single complainant.

Then came blacklisting where companies and individuals compiled lists of alleged spammers and supplied them to the ISP's to ensure that any mail from these companies was suppressed. The ISP's would then seek to block incoming mail to any of their users from the offending IP address, without any checks and balances.

Blacklisters plant spam traps around the internet in internet chat rooms and user groups. If these addresses are then harvested from the internet (which is illegal) and used, then they have caught their spammer red handed. Spamhaus hold a great deal of sway with most ISP's and a listing with Spamhaus will usually result in the immediate shut down of your website until you can prove that the address was obtained with the correct permissions. A close working relationship with your ISP will enable you to overcome an illegitimate attack on your business.

The Federal Trade Commission in the US, frustrated by just 63 convictions since they passed the Can Spam Act are finding that the worst offenders, such as those in Boca Raton in Florida, are routing their SPAM through China to avoid detection. These are organised criminals and it has been hard to get anybody to testify against them. The FTC are considering offering a bounty of up to $250,000 to anybody who will point the finger and provide evidence to convict them.

At the same time new software solutions may provide a new global standard. The blunt tools of the past that can hurt legitimate businesses and prevent genuine messages from reaching their destination may soon be overtaken by more scientific methodologies.

Microsoft has developed the Sender ID Protocol which will verify that an email has come from a legitimate address. This will be a powerful tool in the war against spam if Microsoft can persuade the ISP's to adopt it.

IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center are also working on an exciting product called SpamGuru. This is a multifaceted and intelligent approach to spam. It incorporates verification of the sender, with whitelistings, blacklistings and a piece of technology called Chung-Kwei. Whitelisting and blacklisting are produced by individual recipients voting whether an email is good or bad, generating the preferences of the individual user and ultimately a global list where a high level of complaints by different users will consign a sender to the global blacklist. Chung-Kwei is an algorithm that is capable of identifying the characteristics of spam emails and applying it to incoming mail. The focus of the software is to execute the preferences of the enterprise and the individual user.

The key to a happy spam-free future lies in recognising the preferences of the individual, one man's spam is another man's important business communication. The recipient is best placed to decide. Once the clearly illegal traffic is technologically eliminated by tracking down spoof addresses and emails bounced via multiple servers from Boca Raton via China, the problem becomes much more manageable via user preferences. Just as important will be the free passage of legitimate email which can get caught up in the rather crude nets that filter spam on the web.

What do you want them to do next?

Once you have selected a well targeted list, tested different creatives, complied with data protection legislation and sent out a strong offer, your campaign will reach it's target. Your target opens the email and clicks through to your website. The target is in your marketplace. What do you want them to do next?

Imagine receiving a glossy invitation to a new and exciting retail opportunity and arriving at the venue only to discover that it is a car boot sale. A well-crafted email will deliver traffic to your website but how your audience behaves once they arrive is the true point at which you fail or succeed. The experience you create for the user becomes critical at the point that they reach your landing page.

It is important to repeat the offer made in the email on the landing page and to make acceptance of that offer easy. It should be no more than a click away.

This is not the time to conduct market research. Capture the information you need at this point to deliver on the offer. Complete that transaction first. Capture name, company name, job title and email address first. The email address is the basis of your relationship with the user. At the point that they submit their email address to you, ensure that you inform them that you will be using their address to contact them in future. If you plan to share the information with a third party, permission to do so should also be sought at this time.

Building on the relationship

The landing page offers many opportunities to build on the initial interest you have generated. Ensure that the topics and products listed are relevant to the audience you originally targeted. Think about mechanisms that encourage the user to actively engage with you: newsletters, user chat groups and white papers are all useful tools.

Your landing page is an interactive gateway to your main website and marketplace. Once the user has arrived at your website, you need to make sure that the experience is good and repeatable. The website should be uncluttered, easy to navigate and give out information easily. If you have a broad range of products addressing a range of audiences, think about how best to give the user quick access to a view that is most relevant to them. You could allow them to customise their view of your website by expressing their preferences. User preferences are useful to you and allow you to target new products and services accurately.

Integration

Research firm, Jupiter, has found that co-ordinated multi-channel marketing increases conversion rates by 27% to 50%. Furthermore, they have identified that behavioral targeting can increase revenues by 50% verses sending more email messages.

Responsys, a leading supplier of web-based email management and transmission database platform and services, believes that the trend is accelerating towards marketing effectiveness. This is measured by click-though rates and ROI across the channels. In the case of customer email marketing, Responsys has found that timing is the most significant factor and is currently underplayed in terms of lifecycle management.

Web integration in its simplest form involves building the web site around handling and response management. The segmentation of interest levels within the email should be mirrored with options on the website, and navigation should be optimised so that responders can reach the information and decision pages they want as quickly and logically as possible.

Integration that enables greater personalisation assumes that the segmentation of prospects and customers is undertaken either in the customer database or reflected in the profile groups within the email transmission database. Different landing pages can be used to follow through with the specific messages delivered. In the most advanced situations, different websitecontent is served to different visitors based on their individual profiling.

This also enables the timing of different content and offers to be more precisely managed and forces a communication or campaigning approach based around the key stages of acquisition, purchase and retention.

Figure 3: Lifecycle management (source: Responsys)

Integrating response with your in-house systems is also important and relatively straightforward to do, and is covered earlier in this chapter (see Measuring Response).

Meeting Expectations

The speed and efficiency of the internet creates a whole new set of expectations concerning the fulfilment of requests for information and indeed the fulfilment of orders. Mailing offers traditionally required a 28-day turnaround time for fulfilment. Internet customers are generally looking for immediate service with a turnaround time of no more than seven days and, ideally, next day delivery. If they have a request for information they expect a reply within 24 hours. To avoid losing them to the competition you should reply within 4 hours. Many good websites have a 'call me' button linked to their customer service or sales department which generates an immediate call to the user. This is a great opportunity to take control of the sales process and gather more vital information about the user.

Business Issues

Selling via the internet creates a huge range of opportunities for a business. However, without a clear strategy for coping with them they can become business pressures and lost opportunities. Businesses must dedicate necessary resources to maximise the potential that a web presence can generate for them.

A web presence is redundant without an adequate marketing budget to generate web traffic. Every means should be used to drive traffic to your site including company stationary and above- and below-the-line advertising. Email marketing represents the best opportunity for delivering results.

Managing prospective customers and new customers requires a rethink of both how you hold information and how much information you hold. If executed well, your website will generate a range of interests and preferences against your audience that will inform and refine future marketing activity. If this is not to become overwhelming, you will need to seek a solution that can automatically populate your customer and sales order processing databases. Old and new processes will need to be integrated.

Sales and call centre departments will need to be reviewed if you are to meet the level and expectation attached to the new enquiries you will receive.

Fulfilment

What level of stock do you hold? Higher turnaround expectations will have an impact on the level of stock that you need to have ready for immediate dispatch. This may require a significant investment on your company's part and cannot be undertaken without thorough scenario planning and testing.

Outsourcing

Rapid growth through effective internet marketing can place significant pressures on a business of any size. Some of these pressures can be countered by outsourcing.

Email fulfilment and response measurement can be entirely outsourced with your supplier delivering the traffic directly to your website. Your supplier should be able to send communications to your own customer data, and source third party data that is relevant and compliant with data protection legislation.

Database solutions can either be custom-built or modified to meet your specific business requirements. Very few companies have the IT resources to manage this in-house. A good solution will automate much of the data capture and sales order processing within your organisation and should, ideally, inform a marketing database with campaign management functions.

Initial enquiries to your company can be outsourced to a call centre and interest levels filtered to maximise the time spent by your sales force contacting the best potential. It is important to exercise great care in selecting a call centre: when answering the phone it is the call centre's staff who represent your business. Make sure that the call centre understands your business and your objectives and be prepared to meet and be involved in the training of the call centre staff.

A host of companies provide fulfilment and warehousing solutions with excellent track records serving the traditional postal marketing businesses. If however you are working with a manufacturer or an intermediary supplier, ask them if they will drop-ship. This means that they will dispatch directly to your customers on your instructions avoiding warehousing and the accompanying investment requirement.

Plan for success

Success in internet marketing is not a result of luck and does not lie in the power of a good email campaign alone. A fully planned and tested e-commerce strategy is required for any long term success. Big and small companies can now compete side by side. Big companies will need to learn innovation and flexibility and small companies will need to learn how to plan for growth. Technology offers us all the means to revolutionise future communications with our customers and this is not just an IT role. It will take vision on the part of business leaders and sales and marketing directors to apply it to best effect.

Glossary

Multi-channel	Combining different ways of communicating with a target market such as email, mail, telemarketing.
HTML	The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a simple data format used to create hypertext documents that are portable from one platform to another.
Spam	With a small 's', spam stands for simultaneously published advertising message, and is commonly used to refer to blanket e-mailers that do not differentiate their audience. Lists can be acquired in the USA and elsewhere for a few hundred dollars, and are detested by the Internet Service Providers because they clog up their telecommunications bandwidth.
Cascading Style	A programming method that enables you to change the appearance of hundreds of web pages by changing just one file page.
Transmission engine	Refers to (usually) sophisticated software that enables you to transmit, formatted for multiple user web browsers and platforms, measure and analyse. The best are powerful cut-down database applications. The best, like Responsys, offer analytical, creative and personalisation services in addition to their email management and transmission capability.