Engaging customers in e-business: How to build sales, relationships and results with e-mail
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Reviews Engaging customers in e-business: How to build sales, relationships and results with e-mail Jeffrey L. Farris and Laura Langendorf e2 Software Corporation; 1999; paperback; 106pp; $19.95/£19.95
Who will win the BIG prize?
The new marketing skills
Everything about e-mail
The theme: Integrate
Who, in five or ten years time, is going to be in the driving seat of the marketing bandwagon? You, and your colleagues, who are reading this prestigious journal? Certainly the editors would like to think so. Those of us who have grown up in the direct marketing industry have always believed that it is our ultimate destiny to inherit the world that, as David Ogilvy famously said, in the future all marketing will be direct marketing, and that we direct marketers, forced for so long to sit ignominiously below the salt, will at last assume our rightful place at the head of the table. Indeed, it might happen but not to those who sit smugly around waiting for the prize to fall into their laps. The arrival of the Internet, and of the Web, has made Ogilvys prophecy, unlikely as it seemed to this reviewer on first hearing it, an odds-on bet in very short order, for reasons that the prophet himself can never have envisaged. (But that is often the way with prophets unchancy folk.) But it does not follow that, as all marketing turns direct (or interactive, as it is fashionable to call it these days), we established direct marketers will necessarily be elected by acclaim to the leadership roles we so richly deserve. (Well, dont we?) There are other hungry predators roaming these woods, and if some of them lack the marketing finesse of a direct mail copywriter, well, they know how to programme a computer, to design a website, or to manipulate e-mail. And in this new world these are marketing skills, necessary even if not sufficient. Which brings us to this book. (Or booklet.) It is all about e-mail sending it, receiving it, gathering its addresses, writing it effectively, and integrating it with other channels and functions. It is untechnical, easy to read, and a highly pragmatic book, dealing, for instance in the first chapter, with different ways of sending e-mail (personal clients, team clients, auto-responders, rules-based autoresponders, smart auto-responders, list servers, bulk mailers, sequenced mailers and integrated e-mail management) together with the advantages and disadvantages of each (except the last, which is not accorded any explicit disadvantages). Anyone who is not already wholly conversant with all the possibilities inherent in the use of e-mail in conjunction with a website and a database can learn from this book; even the expert may find it has some useful tips and insights or at the very least is an acceptable aide memoire. The central theme of the book is quickly stated:
for most companies email works in a vacuum
[it] can be integral to almost every other system
[it] should be repositioned as a feature of other existing applications. Anyone who thinks that e-mail is just a device for e
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