Topic | CRM

Watchfire reaches thousands of people a day through its large LED displays. But it uses a different medium to reach sign dealers who sell its products—the e-mail newsletter.

Marketers have long relied on print publications to establish “communities of interest.” E-newsletters do this and more, by providing a unique Web-based vehicle for “layered content” that delivers precision contextual marketing.

A general newsletter is a great way to get started in the e-zine game, especially if your audience is diverse. You can use a general-interest newsletter to promote a wide variety of offerings and see what works.

Q: What’s the right number of articles for an issue of your e-mail newsletter? A: Seven. Only kidding. There is no magic number of articles that works for every newsletter.

You know the age-old maxim: the customer is always right. The extension of that for the e-mail marketing community is: let customers choose what is right for them.

ISPs today block up to 90 percent of e-mail because the messages are suspected to be spam. What’s a marketer to do? Answer: Stay on the good side of ISPs.

When measuring the effectiveness of a promotion, it's not enough to know the overall response and revenue. What you really need to measure is the incremental order activity generated by the promotion.

Successful database marketing has always been based on communications. Why spend millions on a database unless you use it to send personal messages to your customers?

Would you promote a Microsoft database event to someone who wasn't interested? Or a Women in Technology event to businessmen? If so, even your better- targeted communications may fall on deaf ears.

Think of it as a prime example of the business cliché about eating your own dog food: The U.S. Postal Service has launched a free magazine about the virtues and successes of direct mail.