The Internet and Email

The Internet has transformed business over the last decade and marketing more than most other functions. Though email was well on its way up the charts in 1998, its use for marketing was very much in its infancy while ecommerce sales were virtually non-existent. The sites on offer ran at a crawl over dial-up and were horribly clunky. Remember Barclay Square?
Without the internet, it's hard to see how any of the advances in the last decade could have happened, and it has completely changed how companies interact with their customers. Sites like mobile network Blyk run completely on-line, offering over 200,000 UK 16-24 year-olds fully opted-in to receive communications on their mobile phones. It's claimed 29% average campaign response rate would have been hard to find a decade ago too.
Nothing to do with database marketing a decade ago, web analytics is now increasingly aligned with email and other channel marketing. Efforts by leading vendors to merge on-line and off-line customer data is perhaps the most exciting targeting development of recent years. If successful and not stymied by new legislation, this linkage will bring the richest behavioural information yet on individual customers.
"The breadth of digital interactions and the ability to analyse and track them today would have been nirvana for a marketer in 1998," says james Alty, Managing Director at Apteco.
Email has been variously hailed as the saviour and the death of direct marketing. the saviour because it embodies so many of the benefits of direct mail: in 2007, marketing email volumes overtook direct mail for the first time and the DMA estimate over 30% of the marketing budget is going into email.
Email's not as easy as it used to be though.
Deliverability is emerging as the great challenge and although straightforward sending costs are still low, more companies like Thomson are investing heavily in highly-targeted data-driven campaigns.
"There's a lot more targeting going on now," says Chris McDonald, Managing Director of The Trading Floor, which gathers registration data from online insurance and other enquiries. McDonald notes this has affected the type of data companies want to buy.
"To drive targeting, the market now increasingly wants multichannel contacts for a record, plus transactional and risk data too," he says. "Those selling just an email file will struggle."As well as being the enabler of many of today's vital marketing services such as remote database cleansing sites and on-demand CRM tools, the web has also become an invaluable data collection channel for database marketers. As response to traditional printed lifestyle surveys and warranty cards has dropped off, so data gathered in different areas of the web has taken its place at the leading edge of consumer data.
"The main trend in customer data has been the digital capture of data online," confirms McDonald. With its low delivery costs and incredible automated targeting potential, the importance of the internet can only grow. According to ecommerce industry body IMRG, around half of everything we buy in the next ten years will be online and the other half will be influenced by it.

(Database Marketing 10th Anniversary Issue- November 2008)