Customers will judge your company by how you manage the dialogue of email marketing. So now that you're in their in-box, don't get in their face.

Problem: You need an inexpensive yet targeted way to reach qualified customers.
Solution: Use outsourced email advertising to launch a cost-effective, targeted marketing campaign.

Amid the cacophony of Internet advertising, banner ads just aren't clicking in the cash. You need an inexpensive way to reach the right customers, and email marketing is just the ticket. But a bad email campaign can be worse than none at all. If customers smell spam, you're fried. Do it right, and you'll have them begging (or at least asking politely) to hear from you again.

1. Pick your poison.
   If you manage your mailer software, you have ultimate control over presentation and delivery. But be prepared to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars for the software alone, and thousands more to buy and maintain hardware. Co-branded services like Mypoints.com, Cybergold, and Yesmail.com give you instant access to a wide array of prospects who love to read promotional offers, but these services ultimately own the branding and the customer.

   Hosted systems offer the best mix of power and manageability for all but the smallest companies. Message Media's UnityMail Express (US$3,000 setup fee, plus a per-mail charge of up to 2.5 cents) turns any Internet Explorer window into an e-marketing terminal. MessageMedia sets up an administrator account (you're free to add others) and provides a few hours of phone training to get you started.

2. Ask, don't tell.
   Opt-in ads are the only way to go. Ask. Invite. Coax. Build a simple signup Web form in UnityMail's Form Wizard, and use the white space on your business cards, invoices, and product brochures to point readers in that direction. Ask current subscribers to refer their friends, and send a tentative invitation to those referredâ€"you can set up a separate, one-mail-only list in UnityMail to handle fencesitters. Of course, a little inducement never hurtsâ€"Palm devices (or the chance to win one) are a popular bribe currency, as are special discounts for subscribing customers.

   According to Steve Reed, MessageMedia director of product strategy and marketing, click-through rates of up to 20 percent are possible for permission-based e-mail campaigns. Keep in mind that customers define opt-in advertising quite narrowly. Always ask them what types of information they want, and how often they want to receive it.

   If you insist on uninvited solicitation, consider a targeted lead generation service like Zapdata.com, which will help you find the companies and contacts that fit your market niche for between 10 cents and $1.50 per lead. You specify the industry, region, and number of contacts, and Zapdata packages the report in seconds for immediate download.

3. Stuff the envelope.
   Smart email marketers know the difference between what's real and what's possible. While many users can view their e-mail in HTML format, Reed says that only 36 percent of subscribers prefer HTML email over plain text. While he expects that figure to increase dramatically thanks to America Online's recent software upgrade, plain text still has its placeâ€"it is, after all, universally readable. Some users also have (justified) concerns about privacy and security risks associated with HTML email, and they may never lower their guard.

   The bottom line is, you need a message that's attractive in HTML, but still informative in plain text. It's even possible to have your e-mail sense which format a user can accept and display only the relevant portion. Design your campaign in the HTML editor of your choice, but keep a constant eye on the plain text conversion, and be sure your last-minute changes are reflected in both before pasting into UnityMail.

4. Keep it short.
   Few people have the attention span to read a novella in email. "[As with] any other ad, you have three to five seconds to get their attention," says Kevin Scott of AMR Research. Informative subject lines that identify you and your offer are important, so make liberal use of UnityMail's personalisation tags, which can be embedded in the subject line as well as the body of the message.

   Experts recommend keeping the scope of each mailing narrow unless customers are expecting a full-blown catalog. Present a few offers, summarise the benefits in a digestible form, and ask for the sale. Ideally, this should span no more than two screens of textâ€"this is a marketing piece, not a ballot.

5. Be ready to reply.
   Hit or dud, your email campaign is bound to generate a response from your customers. You need to be ready to answer, especially if it's not the tidy Web click-through you expected. In UnityMail, every list has a Reply Archive that stores every e-mail reply sent to the list, so you can quickly browse reactions and even remove users with a click, if that is their wish. All replies are also forwarded to the list administrator, who should promptly acknowledge more complex requests. If volume is high, share this email account among several members of your customer support staff.

   Ultimately, customers will judge your company by the way you manage the dialogue that you asked them to join.

   Case Study: Mass communications

   CCBN sends as many as 40,000 email messages in an hour. UnityMail Express minimises the burden on their mail server.

   Corporate Communications Broadcast Network offers online investor relations services to more than 2,000 publicly traded companies, and the job of making sure investors know when news breaks falls on product manager Derek Pregent. To simplify Pregent's job, each CCBN-managed site offers an opt-in mailing list to notify shareholders of breaking news and press releases.

   Each month, CCBN sends more than 2 million messages on behalf of its clients, and as many as 40,000 in a single hour. "A typical [e-mail] server can't process those kinds of volumes," says Pregent, so he uses MessageMedia's UnityMail Express service to minimise the burden on his company's mail servers. Because investors primed for instant and late-night trading won't tolerate waiting for news, CCBN worked with Message Media to establish a 15-minute turnaround guarantee, which ensures that every investor signed up for news gets the information fast enough to do something about it.

   All told, CCBN operates some 7,000 mailing lists, with an average of 400 subscribers each. The company has routed its email services through UnityMail Express since early 1998. According to Pregent, the two have scaled together nicely. "It was comforting to know that we weren't their biggest customer," he says. "It makes a lot more sense to outsource the service to provide the best service to our customers. I can't imagine wanting or having to run this internally."

   Using UnityMail

   For a US$3,000 setup fee and an average per-mail charge of less than 2 cents, you can run a reliable, automated ad campaign. UnityMail Express is a fully hosted, Web-based email management system.

   UnityMail supports three types of lists: Announcement, Moderated Discussion, and Unmoderated Discussion. Your marketing lists should be Announcement lists.
   
   
   

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   Use the UnityMail Form Wizard to create a sign-up sheet for your Web site. The boxes automatically refer back to the UnityMail server, populating the subscriber database.
   
   
   

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   Design your ad using any HTML editor, and save an HTML as well as a plain text version to cut and paste into the UnityMail editor. The Trackable URLs feature lets you insert special links, keyed to the ID of the reader so you know who clicked which links and when.
   
   
   

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   UnityMail lets you schedule messages for special events. Be sure to create a welcome message for new participants, and spend some time crafting it--you want readers to feel they've made the right decision in joining your list.
   
   
   

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   You can also manually edit, delete, or add users to your list. UnityMail will flag invalid email addresses (that bounced mail back), letting you avoid paying for emails that nobody will read.
   
   
   
   

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