The Complete
Internet Marketer
Internet Marketer
How Email Marketing Works
Under The Hood
by Jay Neuman
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical Guide To Everything
You Need To Know About Marketing Online
The Internet has turbo-charged old-school direct mail to create the email we all know and love
today. To understand how, we must take a quick look at how email works under the hood. This
article will focus on two key areas where email has advanced beyond its offline print roots: (1)
mass customization and (2) real time relationship marketing. These two areas of advance are
made possible by the technology platform underlying email campaigns. An understanding of that
platform reveals how all of this is possible. However, it may get a little technical. Technical jargon
will be kept to a minimum.
This article discusses how email marketing systems work. If you have read up on email before,
you might notice something is conspicuously missing from this discussion. There is no attempt
made here to describe how the technology behind physically delivering email works. Instead, this
section only shows how the technology behind creating an email marketing campaign works. The
assumption is that marketers really do not need to know about how the mail physically gets there,
just so long as it gets there. However, you do need to know about the technology that allows you,
as a marketer, to engage in real time one-to-one marketing with your customers. That is the topic
of this section.
There are four components to the typical email system. These are shown in Figure 7.2. The
interaction of these sub-systems allows the direct marketing process to be automated and
significantly enhanced. These four components are software systems, each handling a different
part of the process.
Email systems come in various shapes and sizes. It is technically possible for all four of these sub-
systems to run on the same physical computer (server). For some smaller systems, that is exactly
what happens.
For larger scale systems, these four components are always separated. Each component runs on
one or more separate machines to optimize the performance of email delivery. For a small
business, you can send email to your customers and prospects without needing all of this
hardware. You can outsource your email program to an email vendor (recommended approach) or
you can buy an email system where all of the components run on the same machine. As you are
successful, your email program will grow. By understanding how these four components of the
email system work, you will be better prepared to scale up your systems as needed to
accommodate growth.
The Campaign Management Software
The heart of any email system is the campaign management software. This is where email
campaigns are created and executed. There are five major functions of the campaign management
software.
1. Define Your Email List and Customer Segments
The first part of setting up an email campaign is to tell your email system who will receive the
email. The campaign management software will allow you to address your email to the entire mail
list or to specific addresses on the list. It will also let you send different versions of the email to
different segments of the list. This is the main purpose of the campaign management software.
One of the powerful features of email is the ability to send targeted communications to different
recipients. You do this by defining customer segments in your campaign management software.
When you set up your campaign, you will also choose the criteria for inclusion in the campaign. The
simplest case is to select everyone who has opted in to receive your email. This could come from a
checkbox on your customer registration page agreeing to receive a newsletter.
However, you will often want to create targeted mailings for specific groups. You may have a bi-
weekly newsletter. On your registration page, you could include checkboxes for a variety of
interests. Then you could create different versions of your newsletter based on the interests
customers identified. You will use your campaign management software to define which customers
get which version. This is done by setting up customer segments when defining your campaign.
Since your campaign management system is linked to your marketing database (discussed below),
you can create targeted segments based on any information in the customer profile. You could
send different promotions to women versus men. You could give a different offer to loyal
customers versus one-time shoppers who signed up for your newsletter.
More advanced email systems allow you to go beyond simply sending different versions to targeted
segments. You can define parameters that will identify content elements to be inserted into the
email document. Perhaps you are an art broker and have an online store selling fine arts. You
could ask your customers what type of art they are interested in: sculpture, painting, mixed media,
etc. Then you could create a single email campaign that notifies customers of new art in the
categories they selected. When the campaign runs, it will check the marketing database for each
recipient, to identify their interests. Then it will search the product database to see if there are any
new products in each category they selected. If there is, it will insert the products for those
categories into the email document.
2. Load the Email Document(s)
The next step is to load the email documents themselves into the campaign. This is a fairly
straightforward process. The campaign management system will have an option to load your
document and identify which segment of the campaign it applies to.
At this point, you must know about different email formats. First is text versus HTML email. Some
people do not have the ability to open HTML documents on their home or office computer. Also,
with dial up modem connections, it can take a long time to open an HTML email document. This is
not as big an issue today as it used to be. However, there are still many users who either cannot or
do not want to receive HTML documents in their email. So how do you deal with this situation?
One answer is to offer an option on your email opt-in page where users can choose HTML or text
versions of your email. Then you include this as a parameter in your customer segmentation.
However, this does not address the case where users log in from different systems. In some cases
they will be at a computer that can read the HTML document. In other cases they will not. The
answer to this question is to create what is called a multi-part MIME document.
MIME is a standard for how documents are formatted when they are transmitted over the Internet.
A multi-part MIME document includes multiple formats in the same document. When the recipient
opens their email, the browser opens the version that is appropriate for that browser. If the user
can only read text, it will open the text document. If they can read HTML, it will open the HTML
document.
In addition to text versus HTML, some people will want to receive email on a wireless device. It is
very common now for people to receive email on their cell phone, PDA (personal digital assistant)
or BlackBerry device. Wireless devices such as these use the Wireless Application Protocol, or
WAP, to display documents in their browsers. WAP browsers cannot display HTML files. Instead,
they read files written in the Wireless Markup Language (WML). This creates the same basic
scenario as text versus HTML. You must create another version of your email document that can be
displayed by wireless browsers.
3. Set Up Campaign Timing and Triggers
The next part of your email campaign is to define when it will be sent. When you send an email
from your personal email account, you will just hit the “send” button. The email goes out. With an
email campaign, this is not such a good idea. We can all remember times when we hit that send
button and then regretted it. With email campaigns, you will set a time when the email will start
sending. You will usually want to send a test campaign to a few recipients within your business
first. That way you can make sure there will be no problems when you send it to the full list.
There are basically two ways to time an email campaign. The first is to send the email out to the
entire list all at once. The second kind is sent out in response to triggers. We will start with the
simplest case.
For a one-time campaign being sent to your list, you will simply define the campaign and set a time
when the campaign will be launched. This is pretty straightforward.
The next case is a campaign that goes out automatically on a given schedule. In our example of
the fine arts dealer, the new product announcement could be set up to run automatically. In the
campaign managements system, you could set the time to every Monday at 11:00PM, for example.
That way, your customers would get the email in their inbox the first thing in the morning every
Tuesday. This same technique applies to birthday emails. If you want an email to go out on your
customer’s birthday, you would have a campaign run every day. It will go through your email list
and send an email to everyone whose birthday matches today’s date (or some number of days
before their birthday).
Next comes an email campaign that is triggered by an event. The most common example of this is
an auto-response to some event that occurs on your website. For example, when someone submits
a customer complaint through a form on your website, you could trigger a response notifying the
customer that their issue was received and they would be contacted within a given period of time to
resolve it. There are a couple of different ways email systems can set up triggers. The key thing is
the ability to set up campaigns that can be launched dynamically based on triggering events.
4. Capture Results and Maintain Campaign History
In addition to defining campaigns to be sent, the campaign management system will also maintain a
record of all campaigns that have been run. This is called the campaign history. When you send
out your email, a record is created in your marketing database for every person who the email was
sent to. So you will have a record of everyone who you sent email to and when. But this in itself is
not very useful. You want to know how effective your email was.
When you set up your campaign, you will also identify a number of metrics that will be recorded in
your campaign history, along with the fact that an email was sent. The most basic metrics are
bounce-backs and responses. This is one place where all four components of your email system
work together. The email server (discussed below) will try to send out every email. If it is unable
to deliver one, or more of those emails, it will record it as an undeliverable email address. This is
known as a bounce back. Some campaign management systems will receive this information from
the email server and write it into the campaign history.
For emails that do get through, you want to know what happens when people receive them. This is
where the web server (discussed below) comes in. For HTML emails, when a recipient opens the
email, it can be set up to call your web server to serve a tiny, invisible image into the HTML page.
The web server records this. Some campaign management systems will also record it in your
campaign history. You will have a metric for opened emails. Next, when someone clicks on a link
in your email, a web page is served. In some cases, that page will also be served by the email
system. This event is also recorded and can be put into the campaign history. This gives you a
metric for responses. By using the web server associated with your campaign management
system, you can set up a variety of things to record in your campaign history. This will be
discussed below in a section on the web server.
5. Generate Reports
Finally, your campaign management system will generate reports. Basically, anything that has
been captured into the campaign history can be reported on. How much reporting is available will
be a function of your campaign management system. Some provide very little reporting. Others
let you to build elaborate customized reports.
The Marketing Database
Behind the campaign management software sits a marketing database. This is the database where
you store your customer list and all the information about your customers that is needed to run
campaigns. There are three core components in the typical marketing database.
1. Customer List(s)
Your marketing database is fundamentally a database of customers and prospects. At the core, it is
a list. The simplest version of a marketing database would be a simple list of everyone who opted
in to your email list and their email addresses. However, this would not allow much flexibility with
your email program. Most marketing databases will also include a lot of information about each
customer on the list. The general rule is that everything you might need to know to effectively
market to your customers should be in the marketing database. This information is sometimes
called the customer profile.
2. Customer Profile
The customer profile refers to a set of fields in the database with information about each customer.
Perhaps you have an email program for your company consisting of a weekly newsletter and
birthday rewards. When customers sign up for your email, you give them the opportunity to choose
which of these they want to receive. You also ask them some basic product interests that you will
use to target the newsletter content. A fairly basic marketing database will contain the name and
email address of each recipient plus fields for each of these options.
This basic customer profile will be quite sufficient for many email programs. However, if you want
to get more sophisticated, you can include almost anything you want in the customer profile. You
could include demographics such as age and income. You could create custom segmentation codes
based on how much money they spend with your company or how long they have been a
customer. For almost anything you can conceive, you could probably find a way to get it into the
marketing database. Once there, you can use it to create targeted email campaigns.
Another important thing stored in your marketing database is information that will be used as
triggers for relationship marketing emails. This could be your customer’s birthday. It could be
special days they identified when they need to make gift purchases. If you offer financial services,
it could be the stock value when they want their stock to be sold. Once again, almost anything you
can think of can be stored in the database.
One caution about your marketing database is to take special care with information that may be
subject to your privacy policy. Websites and email programs are subject to strict enforcement of
privacy concerns. In other words, people do not want their personal information being made
public. Now most companies do not willfully violate their customers’ privacy concerns but accidents
do happen. We have all heard news stories about organizations who have had their computers
hacked into or accidentally released information about their customers. You must be vigilant
against this happening to you. The first line of defense is to take care to ensure the security of your
customer data and the computers it sits on.
3. Campaign History
The marketing database will include a record of every campaign that is sent out. This was
discussed above. You will have a record of each campaign, of each recipient of those campaigns
and a variety of metrics you have chosen to measure. By having this information, you will be able
to measure the success or failure of your email campaigns. You will also be able to measure trends
and continuously improve your email program.
A simple way to understand the campaign history component of your marketing database is to think
of it as consisting of two tables. A table is basically the same thing as a spreadsheet with rows and
columns. In the first table, you have one row for each campaign. It shows the basic details of the
campaign, including the name, description and timing of the campaign. In the second table, you
have a row for each recipient of each campaign. Clearly, this is the bigger table. In fact, it can get
quite huge. There will be one row for each person on your email list every time they receive an
email. It will record the campaign they received plus all of the metrics you set up to be measured
for that campaign.
By having all of this information in one place, you will be able to do analysis about both campaigns
and customers. You can see how well campaigns work with different types of offers. You can see if
your emails are more likely to be opened if they are sent on different days or have different subject
lines. You can see if different customer segments respond better than others. Having all of this
information in one place allows you to easily create a set of reports that can be used to continuously
monitor and improve your email program.
The Web Server
For any given email campaign, one or more HTML documents will be created and loaded into the
campaign management system. When the email is sent out, an HTML document is sent out to the
recipient. This is actually an HTML web page that is served by your web server. The web server
loads the HTML document plus all images and other files to be displayed, just as if it were serving a
page on your website. The only difference is the page is served into the email document. The web
server will generate a complete email document for each recipient as the email is being sent out. A
common technique is to also include in the document a call for a tiny, invisible image to be served
from the web server when the user opens the email. This allows an open rate to be calculated for
the email campaign.
In more advanced systems, the web server will sometimes be used to also generate the landing
pages for links in the email document. This gives you more flexibility in customizing landing pages
based on parameters in the email campaign. The campaign management system can recognize the
customer identifier carried by the email link and tell the web server exactly what landing page to
serve. (This can still be done without linking the web server to the campaign management system,
but it requires extensive use of parameters in the linking URLs from the email message.)
An even more significant reason for serving web pages through the email campaign itself is that it
allows the campaign management system to track every action that occurs after the customer clicks
thru. Some companies will include copies of all the key pages, all the way through the conversion
event. In addition to ease of tracking results, content on the pages can be tailored to reflect the
marketing messaging in the email campaign. This capability of more advanced campaign
management systems also allows email agencies to offer a much more robust service to clients who
want to outsource a larger integrated marketing program.
The Email Server
The final component to the email system is the email server itself. This system does nothing except
send out emails.
When the campaign management system starts running the campaign, it creates a separate
document for each and every recipient on the mail list. This includes at least a minimum of
personalization in the email address and the opening greeting. In some cases, there will be
customized documents generated for each customer based on preferences they entered when
subscribing to the email.
These email documents are queued up in the email server. They are then sent out one at a time.
The email server checks the email address and attempts to deliver the email. It will record all of
the successful deliveries. Unsuccessful deliveries (called bounce backs) are also recorded. The list
of bounce backs is usually used to purge the email list of bad email addresses. For example, if an
address cannot be reached in three successive campaigns, it may be tagged as a dead email
address. By removing it from the list, you will reduce the load on your email server in future
campaigns.
Now let us see how all four components of the email system work together.
Mass Customization
One of the most powerful features of email is the ability to customize messages to each subscriber.
Most email documents today are in HTML. That means your email message is a web page. All of
the customization that you are able to do on a web page can also be done with email. We saw how
this works above. You can ask your subscribers to provide information about themselves and their
email preferences. This information can then be included in their customer profile. When the email
is sent out, the campaign management software searches the marketing database for the
parameters associated with each subscriber’s profile. Then content is inserted, by the web server,
into the HTML page based on those parameters.
You may receive emails like this yourself. A common type of customized email is to allow users to
enter a search criteria for information that interests them. For example, a real estate website could
allow users to enter search criteria for the type of home they want to purchase. Then an email
could be sent out with new listings matching that criteria. This could be a weekly email. Or it could
be sent out only when new listings appear that match their criteria. In this second case, the
campaign could actually run every day, but only send email to those where search results are found
meeting the user’s criteria.
Real Time Relationship Marketing
The last section has shown how the email system can create a customized email for each
subscriber. Now let us see how it also allows you to use triggers to send out those emails at times
that are customized to the needs of your relationship with each customer.
We saw above how a subscriber’s search criteria can be used as a trigger to send email to them.
They simply enter the criteria for information they want to receive and the email system sends an
email whenever that search returns results matching their search. There are also other ways to
trigger email based on needs the customer identifies within their customer profile. These can
include:
Next, is email triggered not by information defined in the user profile, but by events that occur onthe website or with the online business. Examples of this type of triggering event include:
==========================
This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical Guide To Everything You
Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500 companies, startup
Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their Internet Marketing and Database Marketing
challenges.
Jay is currently Sole Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com
Under The Hood
by Jay Neuman
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical Guide To Everything
You Need To Know About Marketing Online
The Internet has turbo-charged old-school direct mail to create the email we all know and love
today. To understand how, we must take a quick look at how email works under the hood. This
article will focus on two key areas where email has advanced beyond its offline print roots: (1)
mass customization and (2) real time relationship marketing. These two areas of advance are
made possible by the technology platform underlying email campaigns. An understanding of that
platform reveals how all of this is possible. However, it may get a little technical. Technical jargon
will be kept to a minimum.
This article discusses how email marketing systems work. If you have read up on email before,
you might notice something is conspicuously missing from this discussion. There is no attempt
made here to describe how the technology behind physically delivering email works. Instead, this
section only shows how the technology behind creating an email marketing campaign works. The
assumption is that marketers really do not need to know about how the mail physically gets there,
just so long as it gets there. However, you do need to know about the technology that allows you,
as a marketer, to engage in real time one-to-one marketing with your customers. That is the topic
of this section.
There are four components to the typical email system. These are shown in Figure 7.2. The
interaction of these sub-systems allows the direct marketing process to be automated and
significantly enhanced. These four components are software systems, each handling a different
part of the process.
Email systems come in various shapes and sizes. It is technically possible for all four of these sub-
systems to run on the same physical computer (server). For some smaller systems, that is exactly
what happens.
For larger scale systems, these four components are always separated. Each component runs on
one or more separate machines to optimize the performance of email delivery. For a small
business, you can send email to your customers and prospects without needing all of this
hardware. You can outsource your email program to an email vendor (recommended approach) or
you can buy an email system where all of the components run on the same machine. As you are
successful, your email program will grow. By understanding how these four components of the
email system work, you will be better prepared to scale up your systems as needed to
accommodate growth.
The Campaign Management Software
The heart of any email system is the campaign management software. This is where email
campaigns are created and executed. There are five major functions of the campaign management
software.
1. Define Your Email List and Customer Segments
The first part of setting up an email campaign is to tell your email system who will receive the
email. The campaign management software will allow you to address your email to the entire mail
list or to specific addresses on the list. It will also let you send different versions of the email to
different segments of the list. This is the main purpose of the campaign management software.
One of the powerful features of email is the ability to send targeted communications to different
recipients. You do this by defining customer segments in your campaign management software.
When you set up your campaign, you will also choose the criteria for inclusion in the campaign. The
simplest case is to select everyone who has opted in to receive your email. This could come from a
checkbox on your customer registration page agreeing to receive a newsletter.
However, you will often want to create targeted mailings for specific groups. You may have a bi-
weekly newsletter. On your registration page, you could include checkboxes for a variety of
interests. Then you could create different versions of your newsletter based on the interests
customers identified. You will use your campaign management software to define which customers
get which version. This is done by setting up customer segments when defining your campaign.
Since your campaign management system is linked to your marketing database (discussed below),
you can create targeted segments based on any information in the customer profile. You could
send different promotions to women versus men. You could give a different offer to loyal
customers versus one-time shoppers who signed up for your newsletter.
More advanced email systems allow you to go beyond simply sending different versions to targeted
segments. You can define parameters that will identify content elements to be inserted into the
email document. Perhaps you are an art broker and have an online store selling fine arts. You
could ask your customers what type of art they are interested in: sculpture, painting, mixed media,
etc. Then you could create a single email campaign that notifies customers of new art in the
categories they selected. When the campaign runs, it will check the marketing database for each
recipient, to identify their interests. Then it will search the product database to see if there are any
new products in each category they selected. If there is, it will insert the products for those
categories into the email document.
2. Load the Email Document(s)
The next step is to load the email documents themselves into the campaign. This is a fairly
straightforward process. The campaign management system will have an option to load your
document and identify which segment of the campaign it applies to.
At this point, you must know about different email formats. First is text versus HTML email. Some
people do not have the ability to open HTML documents on their home or office computer. Also,
with dial up modem connections, it can take a long time to open an HTML email document. This is
not as big an issue today as it used to be. However, there are still many users who either cannot or
do not want to receive HTML documents in their email. So how do you deal with this situation?
One answer is to offer an option on your email opt-in page where users can choose HTML or text
versions of your email. Then you include this as a parameter in your customer segmentation.
However, this does not address the case where users log in from different systems. In some cases
they will be at a computer that can read the HTML document. In other cases they will not. The
answer to this question is to create what is called a multi-part MIME document.
MIME is a standard for how documents are formatted when they are transmitted over the Internet.
A multi-part MIME document includes multiple formats in the same document. When the recipient
opens their email, the browser opens the version that is appropriate for that browser. If the user
can only read text, it will open the text document. If they can read HTML, it will open the HTML
document.
In addition to text versus HTML, some people will want to receive email on a wireless device. It is
very common now for people to receive email on their cell phone, PDA (personal digital assistant)
or BlackBerry device. Wireless devices such as these use the Wireless Application Protocol, or
WAP, to display documents in their browsers. WAP browsers cannot display HTML files. Instead,
they read files written in the Wireless Markup Language (WML). This creates the same basic
scenario as text versus HTML. You must create another version of your email document that can be
displayed by wireless browsers.
3. Set Up Campaign Timing and Triggers
The next part of your email campaign is to define when it will be sent. When you send an email
from your personal email account, you will just hit the “send” button. The email goes out. With an
email campaign, this is not such a good idea. We can all remember times when we hit that send
button and then regretted it. With email campaigns, you will set a time when the email will start
sending. You will usually want to send a test campaign to a few recipients within your business
first. That way you can make sure there will be no problems when you send it to the full list.
There are basically two ways to time an email campaign. The first is to send the email out to the
entire list all at once. The second kind is sent out in response to triggers. We will start with the
simplest case.
For a one-time campaign being sent to your list, you will simply define the campaign and set a time
when the campaign will be launched. This is pretty straightforward.
The next case is a campaign that goes out automatically on a given schedule. In our example of
the fine arts dealer, the new product announcement could be set up to run automatically. In the
campaign managements system, you could set the time to every Monday at 11:00PM, for example.
That way, your customers would get the email in their inbox the first thing in the morning every
Tuesday. This same technique applies to birthday emails. If you want an email to go out on your
customer’s birthday, you would have a campaign run every day. It will go through your email list
and send an email to everyone whose birthday matches today’s date (or some number of days
before their birthday).
Next comes an email campaign that is triggered by an event. The most common example of this is
an auto-response to some event that occurs on your website. For example, when someone submits
a customer complaint through a form on your website, you could trigger a response notifying the
customer that their issue was received and they would be contacted within a given period of time to
resolve it. There are a couple of different ways email systems can set up triggers. The key thing is
the ability to set up campaigns that can be launched dynamically based on triggering events.
4. Capture Results and Maintain Campaign History
In addition to defining campaigns to be sent, the campaign management system will also maintain a
record of all campaigns that have been run. This is called the campaign history. When you send
out your email, a record is created in your marketing database for every person who the email was
sent to. So you will have a record of everyone who you sent email to and when. But this in itself is
not very useful. You want to know how effective your email was.
When you set up your campaign, you will also identify a number of metrics that will be recorded in
your campaign history, along with the fact that an email was sent. The most basic metrics are
bounce-backs and responses. This is one place where all four components of your email system
work together. The email server (discussed below) will try to send out every email. If it is unable
to deliver one, or more of those emails, it will record it as an undeliverable email address. This is
known as a bounce back. Some campaign management systems will receive this information from
the email server and write it into the campaign history.
For emails that do get through, you want to know what happens when people receive them. This is
where the web server (discussed below) comes in. For HTML emails, when a recipient opens the
email, it can be set up to call your web server to serve a tiny, invisible image into the HTML page.
The web server records this. Some campaign management systems will also record it in your
campaign history. You will have a metric for opened emails. Next, when someone clicks on a link
in your email, a web page is served. In some cases, that page will also be served by the email
system. This event is also recorded and can be put into the campaign history. This gives you a
metric for responses. By using the web server associated with your campaign management
system, you can set up a variety of things to record in your campaign history. This will be
discussed below in a section on the web server.
5. Generate Reports
Finally, your campaign management system will generate reports. Basically, anything that has
been captured into the campaign history can be reported on. How much reporting is available will
be a function of your campaign management system. Some provide very little reporting. Others
let you to build elaborate customized reports.
The Marketing Database
Behind the campaign management software sits a marketing database. This is the database where
you store your customer list and all the information about your customers that is needed to run
campaigns. There are three core components in the typical marketing database.
1. Customer List(s)
Your marketing database is fundamentally a database of customers and prospects. At the core, it is
a list. The simplest version of a marketing database would be a simple list of everyone who opted
in to your email list and their email addresses. However, this would not allow much flexibility with
your email program. Most marketing databases will also include a lot of information about each
customer on the list. The general rule is that everything you might need to know to effectively
market to your customers should be in the marketing database. This information is sometimes
called the customer profile.
2. Customer Profile
The customer profile refers to a set of fields in the database with information about each customer.
Perhaps you have an email program for your company consisting of a weekly newsletter and
birthday rewards. When customers sign up for your email, you give them the opportunity to choose
which of these they want to receive. You also ask them some basic product interests that you will
use to target the newsletter content. A fairly basic marketing database will contain the name and
email address of each recipient plus fields for each of these options.
This basic customer profile will be quite sufficient for many email programs. However, if you want
to get more sophisticated, you can include almost anything you want in the customer profile. You
could include demographics such as age and income. You could create custom segmentation codes
based on how much money they spend with your company or how long they have been a
customer. For almost anything you can conceive, you could probably find a way to get it into the
marketing database. Once there, you can use it to create targeted email campaigns.
Another important thing stored in your marketing database is information that will be used as
triggers for relationship marketing emails. This could be your customer’s birthday. It could be
special days they identified when they need to make gift purchases. If you offer financial services,
it could be the stock value when they want their stock to be sold. Once again, almost anything you
can think of can be stored in the database.
One caution about your marketing database is to take special care with information that may be
subject to your privacy policy. Websites and email programs are subject to strict enforcement of
privacy concerns. In other words, people do not want their personal information being made
public. Now most companies do not willfully violate their customers’ privacy concerns but accidents
do happen. We have all heard news stories about organizations who have had their computers
hacked into or accidentally released information about their customers. You must be vigilant
against this happening to you. The first line of defense is to take care to ensure the security of your
customer data and the computers it sits on.
3. Campaign History
The marketing database will include a record of every campaign that is sent out. This was
discussed above. You will have a record of each campaign, of each recipient of those campaigns
and a variety of metrics you have chosen to measure. By having this information, you will be able
to measure the success or failure of your email campaigns. You will also be able to measure trends
and continuously improve your email program.
A simple way to understand the campaign history component of your marketing database is to think
of it as consisting of two tables. A table is basically the same thing as a spreadsheet with rows and
columns. In the first table, you have one row for each campaign. It shows the basic details of the
campaign, including the name, description and timing of the campaign. In the second table, you
have a row for each recipient of each campaign. Clearly, this is the bigger table. In fact, it can get
quite huge. There will be one row for each person on your email list every time they receive an
email. It will record the campaign they received plus all of the metrics you set up to be measured
for that campaign.
By having all of this information in one place, you will be able to do analysis about both campaigns
and customers. You can see how well campaigns work with different types of offers. You can see if
your emails are more likely to be opened if they are sent on different days or have different subject
lines. You can see if different customer segments respond better than others. Having all of this
information in one place allows you to easily create a set of reports that can be used to continuously
monitor and improve your email program.
The Web Server
For any given email campaign, one or more HTML documents will be created and loaded into the
campaign management system. When the email is sent out, an HTML document is sent out to the
recipient. This is actually an HTML web page that is served by your web server. The web server
loads the HTML document plus all images and other files to be displayed, just as if it were serving a
page on your website. The only difference is the page is served into the email document. The web
server will generate a complete email document for each recipient as the email is being sent out. A
common technique is to also include in the document a call for a tiny, invisible image to be served
from the web server when the user opens the email. This allows an open rate to be calculated for
the email campaign.
In more advanced systems, the web server will sometimes be used to also generate the landing
pages for links in the email document. This gives you more flexibility in customizing landing pages
based on parameters in the email campaign. The campaign management system can recognize the
customer identifier carried by the email link and tell the web server exactly what landing page to
serve. (This can still be done without linking the web server to the campaign management system,
but it requires extensive use of parameters in the linking URLs from the email message.)
An even more significant reason for serving web pages through the email campaign itself is that it
allows the campaign management system to track every action that occurs after the customer clicks
thru. Some companies will include copies of all the key pages, all the way through the conversion
event. In addition to ease of tracking results, content on the pages can be tailored to reflect the
marketing messaging in the email campaign. This capability of more advanced campaign
management systems also allows email agencies to offer a much more robust service to clients who
want to outsource a larger integrated marketing program.
The Email Server
The final component to the email system is the email server itself. This system does nothing except
send out emails.
When the campaign management system starts running the campaign, it creates a separate
document for each and every recipient on the mail list. This includes at least a minimum of
personalization in the email address and the opening greeting. In some cases, there will be
customized documents generated for each customer based on preferences they entered when
subscribing to the email.
These email documents are queued up in the email server. They are then sent out one at a time.
The email server checks the email address and attempts to deliver the email. It will record all of
the successful deliveries. Unsuccessful deliveries (called bounce backs) are also recorded. The list
of bounce backs is usually used to purge the email list of bad email addresses. For example, if an
address cannot be reached in three successive campaigns, it may be tagged as a dead email
address. By removing it from the list, you will reduce the load on your email server in future
campaigns.
Now let us see how all four components of the email system work together.
Mass Customization
One of the most powerful features of email is the ability to customize messages to each subscriber.
Most email documents today are in HTML. That means your email message is a web page. All of
the customization that you are able to do on a web page can also be done with email. We saw how
this works above. You can ask your subscribers to provide information about themselves and their
email preferences. This information can then be included in their customer profile. When the email
is sent out, the campaign management software searches the marketing database for the
parameters associated with each subscriber’s profile. Then content is inserted, by the web server,
into the HTML page based on those parameters.
You may receive emails like this yourself. A common type of customized email is to allow users to
enter a search criteria for information that interests them. For example, a real estate website could
allow users to enter search criteria for the type of home they want to purchase. Then an email
could be sent out with new listings matching that criteria. This could be a weekly email. Or it could
be sent out only when new listings appear that match their criteria. In this second case, the
campaign could actually run every day, but only send email to those where search results are found
meeting the user’s criteria.
Real Time Relationship Marketing
The last section has shown how the email system can create a customized email for each
subscriber. Now let us see how it also allows you to use triggers to send out those emails at times
that are customized to the needs of your relationship with each customer.
We saw above how a subscriber’s search criteria can be used as a trigger to send email to them.
They simply enter the criteria for information they want to receive and the email system sends an
email whenever that search returns results matching their search. There are also other ways to
trigger email based on needs the customer identifies within their customer profile. These can
include:
 | Reminder programs (for example, it is time for an oil change) | |
| Emails based on triggering events (for example, a product that interests them appears in | |
| current inventory) | ||
| Emails based on special events on the calendar (for example, their birthdays) |
Next, is email triggered not by information defined in the user profile, but by events that occur on
| Customer reaches a certain level in their reward points program | |
| Customer exceeds a certain sales volume and qualifies for a discount, or a loyalty reward | |
| Customer buys certain items and receives coupons for other related items | |
| Customer fails to return to make a purchase after a certain amount of time and receives an | |
| incentive to return or an inquiry about the customer service experience. |
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This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical Guide To Everything You
Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500 companies, startup
Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their Internet Marketing and Database Marketing
challenges.
Jay is currently Sole Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com