When interactive e-mail talks, customers talk back
The latest twist in crafting e-mail marketing campaigns is to create a dialogue.
Proponents argue that marketers should take advantage of the interactivity that
e-mail provides—both in prompting consumers to take an action and in the
ease of sending e-mails so customers can stay informed. “E-mail marketing
is an oxymoron,” says V.A. Shiva, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based EchoMail
Inc. “Blasting out e-mails can have a severely negative impact on e-mail
marketing and customer relationships, fundamentally hurting ROI and brand awareness.”
EchoMail was behind two successful interactive e-mail campaigns recently. Fashion
designer Calvin Klein this spring ended a three-year dialogue with 1 million
customers who sent e-mail addresses to Calvin Klein so they could correspond
with characters in a soap-opera style series of commercials for Klein’s
cK One fragrance.
When Calvin Klein launched the cK One scent in 1998, the company wanted to
use new technology to create a marketing buzz about its new unisex fragrance.
Calvin Klein had considered promoting a web site, but decided web sites were
too impersonal. Thus it opted for a more personal e-mail campaign, hoping to
create a conversation with consumers and some marketing buzz. Each of the 16
characters in the commercials had an e-mail address that appeared at the end
of the commercial. While the e-mails did not directly promote cK One, the e-mail
addresses included the brand name, such as tia@ckone.com. Calvin Klein had expected
the campaign to run for six months.
The EchoMail system managed all the incoming mail to the cK One character addresses.
To keep the story going with consumers who sent e-mails, the company used a
script writer to maintain story lines based on particular consumer responses.
EchoMail, which has 200 clients, 30% of which are retailers, uses technology
to analyze customer replies so companies can respond appropriately.
While not engaging in soap-opera marketing, consumer packaged goods manufacturer
The Dial Corp. has been using e-mail related to soap in another way. It affixed
a sticker to its Purex laundry detergent bottles encouraging customers to visit
the Dial web site for a chance to win prizes, including a Chevrolet Tahoe. Dial
says 78% of customers who bought the product at major supermarkets nationwide
logged onto the Dial web site, providing 234,000 e-mail addresses.
When customers enter the code from the sticker into the Dial web site to see
if they’ve won a prize, Dial asks them to fill out a survey on laundry
habits and sign up for an e-mail list. Dial expects to use the list of consumers
to get feedback on new products as well as to run promotions. “We’ve
become much more integrated with offline and online promotion in order to build
better customer relationships,” says Ann Toca, manager of advertising,
promotion and Internet for Dial. “We’re getting our database to a
size that we can market to and we’re getting results we like from the interactive
web program.”
Companies are still struggling with what their customers want to get from them
in e-mails, says David Hallerman, senior analyst at New York-based researchers
e-Marketer Inc. “Any e-mail program that allows customers to give real
feedback is going to work because consumers want to be self-directed not bombarded
with information,” he says.
