Harness the sales power of e-mail

Joanna L. Krotz writes about small-business marketing and management issues. She is the co-author of the "Microsoft Small Business Kit" and runs Muse2Muse Productions, a New York City-based custom publisher.

By Joanna L. Krotz

Got a couple hundred bucks?

That's about all you need to send 1,000 highly personalized e-mail messages to specially selected customers. And that's both the good news and the bad.

When done right, e-mail marketing is not only breathtakingly affordable but also extremely effective. Depending on how you plan to measure (by opened messages, click-throughs or conversion rates) and your targets (whether new, existing or best customers), e-mail marketing can yield response rates that range from a satisfying 5% to a heady 50%.

But the cheap cost of entry has generated a sea of spam and that's obviously made consumers wary and annoyed.

You must make sure to gain opt-in commitments from your prospects or customers before sending any e-mail marketing. That can be in the form of online registration, prior contact or express emailed permission from each recipient.

With that in mind, here's how to launch an e-mail campaign.

1. Define Your Goals

No marketing can succeed with an unlimited or shifting horizon. You must set goals that define your success. For e-mail marketing, campaigns tend to get better results when there's a clear call to action, perhaps with the added urgency of a time-sensitive window. Typically, e-mail marketing can:

At the outset, carefully define what you want from the campaign. Then focus on the messaging and distribution that will achieve it.

2. Connect with Customers

Different designs and messages will yield different results. The idea is to customize batches of messages in order to emphasize benefits that speak to specific customer needs. Electronic tools make it much easier to segment customers and sales leads according to key characteristics.

You can quickly group customers into byte-size market chunks of similar demographics, purchasing history or other qualifiers by using Microsoft Outlook Business Contact Manager.

You'll find seven pre-formatted Account reports, such as Accounts by Rating or Neglected Accounts.

Or you can customize reports, and then export those tailor-made reports into Microsoft Office Excel for further analysis.

Should you need additional, targeted e-mail addresses for your campaign, Business Contact Manager integrates with the fee-based Microsoft Sales Leads service.

This service lets you:

3. Manage the List

If you're developing your own campaign, first create your mailing list. Then select the style of your e-mail publication.

You can avoid hassles by relying on the fee-based Microsoft List Builder service to help make the process easier and more cost-effective. This service creates and sends out your e-mail campaign and then automatically tracks your opened and click-through rates, as well as any opt-out customers.

Industry analysts, such as Jupiter Research, estimate that the cost of e-mails that are sent but not delivered will nearly double from $230 million in 2003 to $419 million in 2008. That kind of forecast prompts many business owners to rely on outside experts to distribute and measure delivery rates.

Don't forget to keep updating customer information. When a new customer contacts you, create an entry for them in Business Contact Manager. Business Contact Manager enables you to consolidate all interactions with a given customer in the Contact History section, including e-mails, tasks, appointments, notes, and documents. If you send out your e-mail campaign to your Business Contacts in Business Contact Manager, this activity will be captured automatically in each recipient's Contact History.

4. Personalize. Personalize. Personalize.

Recipients more readily sign up for e-mail marketing when offered a prize, entry in a sweepstakes or the like. They're also more inclined to register and input personal data when they're already customers of the sponsoring company.

So the more you reward customers for giving you access to personal information and the more familiar they are with your products or brand, the better your responses tend to be.

To get customer buy in, try using name-personalization messages. Make sure you test several subject lines, and message copy and landing pages before the launch.

If you want to use attention-grabbers like video or animation or audio, costs will rise. But you can still do quite a lot with text and links to a Web site or special landing pages.

Some message dos and don'ts:

Finally, support your campaign. Don't simply send out your messages and sit back. Plan specific follow up, say, by sending automated bounce-back replies or by integrating the e-mail campaign with other channels, such as phone calls or direct mail.

The last thing you want to do generate customer interest and then be unprepared to act on it.