Use the basics in e-mail marketing, marketers say

In the early days of Internet marketing, many marketers believed that the Internet community was a homogenous group of tech-oriented consumers. Thus they could adopt a one-size-fits-all strategy when it came to marketing. But no more. Today, e-mail marketing has become more like other types of direct marketing—and merchants have to closely track what gets consumers to respond. Egghead.com, for instance, e-mails its existing customers about once per week and certain active customers will get two e-mails per week, says Jeffrey Sheahan, president and COO.

“When we started using e-mail marketing, it was kind of a one-size fits all concept,” Sheahan says. “But now we’re trying to gauge this tool and start segmenting our customer base based on what they’ve looked at before, what they’ve bought before and what they might need to go with a recent purchase. We consider it a dialogue or creating a prescription for each customer based on their needs.” Egghead does its e-mail marketing in-house and has a customer based of about 4 million who receive e-mails.