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Email marketing is the most utilised form of direct marketing in the online environment. Email marketing utilises push strategy rather than the pull strategy that is used by websites. According to David Hallerman in his article Email Marketing: alive and well; Email marketing, Email marketing was used by 71% of the US online advertisers in 2004, despite filters preventing the delivery of many emails and the continuous assault of Spam.
The current interactive market favourite is in fact email; 12% of advertisers plan to start email campaigns in 2005. Email is an effective formate for marketers to use as it provides a quick efficient way to communicate both commercial and fundraising messages to a specified audience, allowing both one to many and two way communication.
The Spam act 2003 was introduced to protect the rights of consumers. Email marketing, or spamming was becoming so dominating in inboxes that it was backfiring and consumers were getting extremely resentful about the amount of Junk mail they were receiving, especially from offensive sources such as pornography.
The legislation only affects businesses that are in Australia, thus consumers can still be targeted through unsolicited emails from overseas. The legislation gives businesses guidelines and penalties if a company sends unsolicited mail/. Consumers have to opt in to receive newsletters or promotional materials from businesses or organisations.
An e-marketing code of practice is being established by ADMA, that aims to work with the Spam act monitoring and regulate the e-marketing environment (Shea, 2004).
Permission Communications CEO Jeremy Glass believes that the act and code will force companies to raise the bar on performance. Improving the way consumers are treated. The act provides a much more effective results, as it forces companies to have higher quality email list. “They will really force marketers to look closely at exactly what it is they’re trying to achieve with email marketing. And it will evolve from a technology tool used to blast out 10,000 emails into a strategic e-marketing discipline in the same way we’ve seen direct marketing evolve into a discipline over the years,�? says Jeremy Glass.
In surveys by Doubleclick's 2004 Consumer Email Study it was found that consumers often favour permission email marketing messages over other marketing methods:
54% said they would like email to replace telemarketing 45% said they would like email to replace in-person sales calls 40% said they would like email to replace direct mail 33% would like to see email replace retail offers and coupons.
It is evident that many consumers actually prefer email marketing to other forms, it is evident that it is a media that must continue to progress and improve business consumer relationships.
Email can be a powerful and flexible tool to cheaply quickly, and direcly market your sustomers. The messages can be specificly tailoured to appeal to the consumer, resulting in building personalised communication with the consumer.
“There will (always) be Spam as we know it, but it won’t dominate the email traffic as it does today. Instead of making up 76% of all global emails, Spam will perhaps make up 30%, with legitimate email marketing making up a significant proportion instead of the tiny amount it does now�? (Shea, 2004).
Shea, F. (2004, Spet 17)"Saving email marketing" B&T. Retrieved, Oct 24 2005, from http://www.bandt.com.au/news/43/0c026943.asp
"Email marketing"retrieved 17 Oct, 2005, from
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1073919418
"Email Marketing Statistics: Email Effectiveness" COnstant Cntact. retrieved, Oct 24, 2005 fromhttp://www.constantcontact.com/email-marketing-resources/industry-statistics/index.jsp.
--Tia Lancaster 08:49, 28 Oct 2005 (EST)
