This past holiday season, Zagat survey tried something new: It sent out emails that let recipients buy Zagat's famous restaurant guides directly from the body of the message, without being directed to the company's Web site to complete the purchase.

Early results from the nearly monthlong campaign that began in early December are impressive. Zagat's so-called transactional email had conversion rates five times that of regular email, according to Bigfoot Interactive, the agency that developed the campaign. Kate Leahy, director of marketing at Bigfoot, says rates were higher because the buying process was so easy.

Trial run
The campaign, which bigfoot created using Radical Communication's technology, was among the first of its kind. A similar service is available from Cybuy, which has run transactional e-mail campaigns for clients including Blades.com and eBags.

While Bigfoot recommends transactional e-mails to some of its clients, Leahy admits the concept is very immature. "Would I want to sell this at full price and say this is definitely going to work? Probably not. I'd want to work with it more."

Other agencies, such as Beyond Interactive, aren't mentioning the option to clients. "[Transactional email] will play a significant role in our marketing effort as an agency sometime in the next year," says Jordan Berke, director of dialog management at Beyond. But for now, he says, "Clients aren't asking for it."

One reason the technique isn't more popular may be that many advertisers are just learning how to use email as a marketing tool and aren't prepared to add bells and whistles like transactional capabilities. Online shoppers also are more accustomed to logging on to a secure Web page when they buy things over the Internet. And the transactional email systems require users to view the e-mail in HTML format, an option that many people don't have enabled.

Different rate cards make it hard to generalise how much these new campaigns cost, but Dominic DiMascia, Cybuy's chief executive, says adding the ability to buy within an email would add an average of US$500 to $750 to a $5,000 email campaign.

The added expense may prove worthwhile, because traditional email promotions have proven weak at generating sales. A recent study by Arthur Andersen and Knowledge Systems & Research found that 68 percent of respondents say they "occasionally" purchase something after receiving an email, and 15 percent say they never make a purchase.

Giving consumers a faster way to buy may work particularly well for companies selling items that need to be reordered at regular intervals, Internet marketing execs say.

Nevertheless, transactional e-mail still doesn't relieve advertisers of the biggest hurdle they face: They still have to get their email opened and read by consumers already inundated with digital mail.

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