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5  Email marketing

When devising plans for email marketing communications, marketers need to plan for:

● 

outbound email marketing

, where email campaigns are used as a form of direct market-

ing to encourage trial and purchases and as part of a CRM dialogue;

● 

inbound email marketing

, where emails from customers such as support enquiries are man-

aged. These are often managed today in conjunction with chat and co-browsing sessions.

Despite the increase in spam such that the vast majority of emails are spam or viruses (most 

estimates exceed 80%), email can still drive good response levels; this is particularly the case 

with in-house lists, so email communications to customers through e-newsletters or periodic 

email blasts are today a vital communications technique for companies.

The main measures for evaluating email marketing are:

● 

Delivery rate – this excludes email ‘bounces’ – emails will bounce if the email address is no 

longer valid or a spam filter blocks the email. So, online marketers check their ‘deliverabil-

ity’ to make sure their messages are not identified as ‘false positives’ by spam prevention soft-

ware.  Web-  based email providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have introduced standard 

authentication techniques known as Sender ID and Domain Keys which make sure the email 

broadcaster is who they say they are and doesn’t spoof their address as many spammers do.

● 

Open rate – this is measured for HTML messages through downloaded images. It is an 

indication of how many customers open an email, but is not accurate since some users 

have preview panes in their email readers which load the message even if it is deleted with-

out reading and some email readers such as Outlook Express now block images by default 

(this has resulted in a decline in open rates through time).