Marketing practitioners regard email as the 'killer app', the ultimate tool for appllication to the work of marketing.  Marketers crave inexpensive personalized communication of information believed to be of genuine interest with each member of a target audience.  The short hand way of describing this is 1-to-1 communication: talking with one person about issues that matter to that person.  This is the ideal for which marketing practice strives because needs, wants, tastes, and preferences vary to some degree across target prospects.  The more relevant, customized, and accurate the message, the more likely it is to elicit the intended response from the recipient.

Marketing effectiveness improves when well designed and well implemented email communication is supported by a well designed and well managed relational database.  The database houses the information needed to create and execute email marketing campaigns.  This is the preferred foundation for our email campaigns and the basis we'll assume for our work.

• Amazon easy purchase
• eMarketer Daily
• IAB
• MarketingExperiments
• NYT technology
• Web Marketing Today

An entire semester could easily be devoted to the subject of email marketing.  We have the last 4.5 weeks of the semester to learn some important things about the practice.  Our objectives for this subject are to

• explain why professional marketers regard it as the potenial 'killer app',
• describe it's current status with practitioners and email recipients,
• explain how it's done well ,
• build a professional grade email newsletter in hmtl format,
• create and send an html newsletter using
  • SilverPOP technology and
  • myEmma technology.

As with most professional work, there's a vocabulary, or jargon, replete with lots of acronyms, unique to email marketing practice.  This email marketing companion is a handy 'cheat sheet' defining many of these. 

Consider how email marketing is done well; i.e., professionally and effectively.  It requires

• asking permission,
• respecting privacy,
• ensuring relevance,
• ensuring currency and accuracy, and
• measuring results.

Consider these fundamentals.  Click here to learn what L-Soft has to say about email marketing and why it's worth engaging.  Let's consider the essential features of well done commercial email in this slideshow.

Now go here to read more about email.