E-Mail’s Marketing Magic

All interest is active. We take interest. E-mail helps customers act quickly and easily on their interests. That’s why, as Yoyodyne vp marketing Jerry Shereshewsky says, “All Internet promos are premised on an e-mail connection.” To Shereshewsky, that’s the big difference between an e-mail and an ad. An ad is passive, an image for a mass audience. It’s static. By contrast, an e-mail is personal, addressed to “some unknown, unduplicated individual who has willingly opted into taking part in a promo, recognizing that there is marketing and sales stuff coming behind it,” says Shereshewsky.

“What you tell me when you sign up online,” he continues, “is what you are interested in. If you tell me what you are interested in, I can train you and teach you to do what we want you to do.”

E-mail offers an opportunity for repeated consumer exposure to the product, increasing familiarity with it. “The e-mail brings you back again and again to the seller,” says Shereshewsky.

This can prove important in the case of big-ticket items like automobiles, where time and the ability to explain a subject bit by bit can prove crucial to eliciting a purchasing decision.

E-mails are also inexpensive. They remove the middle man. “Ads are a mediated process,” says Shereshewsky. “There is always someone in the middle who collects a toll every time I want to talk to my customer, whether it’s the telephone company or the U.S. Postal Service. With e-mail there is only the customer and the seller.”

Dialogue not only maintains buyer-seller contact and helps the customer act on interest, it makes it possible for the seller to develop customized offers, says Nicholas Darveau-Garneau, president of Custom Disc, New York. In the past, he says, brand managers relied on their retailers for customer information. Now they’re realizing that Web e-mails provide data immediately and in more detail than traditional methods. What results is an individualized offer that answers to the desires of the individual customer.

Because of their speed, e-mails enable marketers to track daily whether the promotion has been fully executed and which parts of the message are drawing the best response. “The data provides you with the ability to make it better the next time,” says vp marketing Lyn Chitow Oakes of Flycast, a San Francisco company that haspartnered with RealTime Media, Haverford, PA, on a $20 million grand prize Wall Street promotion.

The age of real-time promotion has arrived, according to Flycast vp of client services, Rick Thompson. “Using a real-time philosophy means we can create media buys on the fly. We can be out there reaching 20 percent of the Web, and we can provide instantaneous results and see what effect a buy is having in a day’s time.”

Tom Robson, vp of databased marketing services at Harte-Hanks Data Technologies in Bellerica, MA, agrees: ‘What is vital to understand is the incremental response which would have happened independent of the market event, the activity that occurred because of the targeted message.” The Internet does this with unbeatable efficiency, he says.

Without quick tracking, a seller could ploddingly persist with an ineffecive promo message, wasting time and money. But with the quick tracking of e-mails, changes can be made literally overnight.

E-mails net females First Auction, Sunnyvale, CA, is an online auction site. Since 58 percent of Web users are male, First Auction began by targeting affluent male shoppers with discounted offers for computers, gadgets, and consumer electronics. But after reviewing its e-mails, the company suddenly shifted its focus to include more product categories that appeal to women, such as jewelry, 1/2tness products, cosmetics, and collectibles.

The results were immediate: “As we introduced new categories like jewelry, our female audience began to grow,” says Ken Neibaur, vp of marketing for Internet Shopping Network, which operates First Auction. “It became clear that women were responding to new products as well as the bargains, the convenience, and the excitement of winning products at auction.”

First Auction also began to customize promos that stimulated and strengthened female customer interest. Recent events included a Mother’s Day Star Treatment sweepstakes, a Xena: The Warrior Princess Sweepstakes with signed scripts and memorabilia from the show, and a live chat with Serious Skin Care spokesperson Jennifer Flavin-Stallone. It also sponsored a sweepstakes where the winner received a walk-on role on USA Network’s The Net series. A recent sweepstakes with the Universal Pictures movie One True Thing, starring Meryl Streep, offered a mother-and-daughter spa vacation as the grand prize.

By last July, First Auction found that women comprised 41 percent of all new members, up from less than 10 percent the pervious year. Over the last three months, women won a whopping 62 percent of all the auctions and are the top repeat customers at the First Auction site.

Since a New York-based research firm, Jupiter Communications, finds that only 35.3 percent of all online shoppers are women, it’s clear that First Auction has come to have a special appeal for women shoppers. Neibaur expresses surprise at how few content-oriented and community Web sites have targeted women and how few online retailers have focused on women as their core demographic. Judicious tracking of e-mail’s hooked Neibaur’s company, he says, into a “burgeoning online market that had been ignored.”

The college factor The pairing of Boston-based Student Advantage, a 1.5 million-member student discount group, in an Internet venture with AT&T shows what can happens when two enterprises bring their resources to bear on the World Wide Web.

AT&T marketers began their search for a partner earlier this year when they wanted to expand the company’s rewards program. TrueRewards was a fairly traditional, offline loyalty program, in which members earned points, received statements, and phoned in to redeem prizes, according to AT&T vp marketing Earl Quenzel. Although effective, it was also expensive.

AT&T had a Web site, but it wasn’t content-based. It didn’t offer discounts or special offers on items used by students all the time. By contrast, SA had already purchased a Web site developer called Main Quad, San Francisco, that had chat rooms, conferencing, and home-page building capabilities. Main Quad was also skilled in online promos, having run The Cupid Program, which allowed Web surfers to send free e-mail greetings by the hundreds of thousands during the holiday season. Having this Web component in place meant big savings for AT&T and was one of the first points of match between the two, according to Student Advantage executive vp Todd Eichler.

“Developing a content-based Web site costs a lot of money,” he points out.

Student Advantage of1/2cials sought to expand its “usage and distribution” in the college market nationwide and had already signed up 20,000 local retail outlets, attracting clients such as Amtrak and Kinkos. But Eichler says the national partners weren’t satis1/2ed. They wanted higher rates of usage, more exposure.

Other big national brands like Intel and Coca-Cola were already casting sheep’s eyes at the college market, and to Eichler, attracting new national sponsor/partners and expanding SA’s own membership would amount to the same thing. “With us, sponsors and members are of equal importance,” he says.

But real expansion would require a Web partner or component that could successfully market to the 1/2ve million four-year college students and the 14-million two-year and junior college group. SA had a strong background in travel, working with national sponsors like Amtrak, Dollar Rent-A-Car, and Greyhound, but it badly needed to fill other key market areas, especially in telecommunications and 1/2nancial services. (In fact, one of the reasons SA was 1/2rst drawn to AT&T was because it felt AT&T represented top value in both areas.)

SA execs felt they were offering AT&T “a turn-key solution to its college marketing ambitions, a beefed-up rewards program that would have students coming back to purchase again and again,” says Eichler.

SA of1/2cials also saw AT&T as offering “hard, tangible value” for hundreds of thousands of students “unlike other premiums like squeeze bottles, ice cream or candy bars,” Eichler says. A deal with AT&T would also offer lots of ways to attract and retain national sponsors by using incremental offers that dealt in AT&T products. AT&T would also give SA a partner that could deliver ongoing rewards. It would mean a one-stop shop for companies that wanted to reach the college market.

The aims of the two partners came together in the AT&T/Student Advantage Calling Card, a program which will run to year’s end. Sign-up for the program is worth $20 because it waives the yearly SA membership fee. Members also get a Student Advantage Membership ID and AT&T’s lowest phone rates, about 20 cents a minute.

With SA’s 1.5 million members spending $2.5 billion a year on CDs, food, clothes, travel, entertainment and other items during the school year, AT&T/SA had a clear schematic for partners and offers to push students’ buttons. Foot Locker offers holders of the phonecard 15 percent off any product. Staples gives them $5 rebates on purchases of $25 and $10 rebates on $50 buys. Greyhound offers a 15 percent discount on tickets. Tower Records gives a $3 rebate on a single CD, and there are $2 discounts off pizza brands, or $3.50 off full-priced movie tickets. IBM offers 10 percent discounts on computer purchases, and Dollar Rent-A-Car waives insurance charges when it rents to students.

“Students can save at least $50 a year, says Quenzel who adds that SA’s program is similar to AT&T’s earlier Member Benefit cards that gave users discounts at Blockbuster Video and TCBY. SA’s program “had the same kind of cost structure,” Quenzel says.

In exchange for partnering with AT&T, SA is its exclusive telecommunications marketing agent, signing up people on college campuses nationwide.

Prior to its alliance with AT&T, SA had a Web site whose purpose was to find discounts in other cities. Thanks to the Main Quad component, the site was redesigned to become “a daily destination for students,” says Eichler, a goal warmly shared by AT&T.

The AT&T/SA program keeps up a constant dialogue via e-mail with members: “We don’t just give them memberships and go away. Every quarter we offer them new products and new pricing plans,” Eichler says. A recent sample question on the AT&T/SA Web site: “What are the 10 ways in which you will use this card?”

E-mails, a direct dialogue between seller and student changes the transaction from a chore to a human contact, a shared experience, Eichler says. But online promos are just one way of keeping in touch. SA also uses national and regional directories, a quarterly newsletter, brochures, posters, on-campus tabling and grass-roots marketing. SA just finished running an online Mini-Microwave Sweepstakes

The results of the partnership so far? “Tremendous,” says Eichler.

Quenzel says that results this year “are running 100 percent or more ahead of projections. Some schools have blown the promo out the door.”

In September, SA announced it had reached agreements with 16 new sponsors to provide product and services for the 1998-99 school year including Foot Locker, The Wall Street Journal, Egghead, American Eagle Outfitters, Jostens, Lens Direct, Linens ‘n Things, Staples, Sunglass America, Valvoline Instant Oil Change, and World Net. Parents know. College kids can never get enough. N

“What are the other sales opportunities, the new opportunities? That’s one of the biggest Internet issues, ” says Di-Ann Eisnor, president and ceo of New York City’s Eisnor Interactive. Eisnor says that for Internet companies to be successful, they need to partner with offline companies and offline distributors. Building a brand is a costly proposition to many small companies. Traditional direct marketing methods have poor creative and often elicit a poor response. For them, the Internet is the answer, and co-ventures work to the good of Net companies, too,Eisnor says.

New York Today, NY, a local content site, found that many Web users were also business travelers. Eisnor Interactive hooked it up with GTE, which set up kiosks in airports to attract consumers to the New York Today site. In return for registration, New York Today gave away coupons that would get them lunch for the price of a subway token. EI used various technologies to connect passengers to the New York Today site during their business flights to build traffic.

In addition, EI’s field staff hit the streets, trying to reach business commuters on the way to their offices with the coupon offer. To promote the offer, EI distributed 30,000 die-cut spoons. The conversion rates reached eight percent, about four times that of a regular FSI coupon.

For the N2K Music company, EI developed a $5 coupon in the form of a postcard that EI field staff distributed citywide. The card was part of a campaign to sponsor an Intel festival for an audience of music fans. Because of the field staff marketing effort, there was an 8 percent increase of traffic at the N2K site, and of those who went to the site, 46 percent converted the coupon “which is basically a purchase,” says Eisnor.

Driving it home “Eisnor knows the off-the-Internet world,” says EI client Nicholas Darveau-Garneau, president of Custom Disk. com, a firm that sells customized compact disks through the Internet. Thanks to Custom Disk, consumers are able to choose what music they want to hear, the title they want for the CD, plus the disk will have their own name on the cover.

When Custom decided to take on corporate customers, Darveau-Garneau turned to EI. One deal in the works involves a major automotive company that will offer personalized CD’s to consumers taking test drives. The consumer goes to the car dealer, takes the test drive, and obtains a coupon that would allow him or her to pick 10 songs for their personalized CD. Custom Disk will then manufacture the CD for the customer and put on the cover the model of the car the customer just drove.

After three days, the consumer receives his or her own custom CD in the mail. “It’s cool, it’s new, its personal, plus it gives the car company a second chance to have contact with the consumer,” says Darveau-Garneau.

Because an Internet promotion doesn’t usually attain the scale of the typical off-the-net promo, itneeds a chance to reach the consumer again and again. “E-mails allow you to do that,” Darveau-Garneau says.

Jerry Shereshewsky, Yoyodyne’s marketing vp, agrees: “Ads have a lot of bang in execution, but the economics of the online world are about retention and frequency. If you get a chance to talk to someone for nothing again and again, you move away from an interruptive ads towards persuasion. That’s the difference with the Web.”

Custom Disk is on the verge of completing a deal with a top recording label for a joint promo that could mean sending personalized CD’s to 100,000 consumers.