1. Introduction

Email marketing is continuing to revolutionise direct one-to-one marketing. It is the only personalized method of communicating with your customers and potential customers that provides feedback on how many people read an email or expressed an interest. Tracking open rates and identifying accurately the links clicked on any email campaign, means that the Return On Investment is easy to calculate per campaign and success and failure criteria can be easily established and judged.

There are four different types of email marketing solution available today as described in the forthcoming chapters. They are Desktop email marketing, Outsourced email marketing, both Managed and Self Service and finally In-House email marketing. ION Technologies are the authors of an email marketing software application called Subscribe. This software is a highly advanced world leading application that has been triedand tested over the past 6 years by
many major enterprises around the world.

2. The Four Options Available to Email Marketers

DESKTOP EMAIL MARKETING
Typically used by very small companies with a need to push out a few hundred emails. The main advantage of desktop email marketing is that it costs practically nothing. There are countless desktop email marketing products available, all of which do a similar job and work more efficiently than Outlook.

The main problem with desktop email marketing is that the tools are either sending emails via your ISP, where your ISP then sends the mail on your behalf; or where they try to deliver directly without having the correct Internet records in place. Either way, the solution will have limited success, as your ISP will block bulk email blasts and with the introduction of SPF records, most major ISP's will stop the other delivery techniques used by desktop email marketing tools. It is also not possible to track open rates and clicks or properly manage bounced emails using a desktop email marketing application. Unsubscribes are also hard to manage as data is held on a single PC and the risk of resending to an unsubscribed member is high.

OUTSOURCED SELF SERVICE EMAIL MARKETING
Sometimes known as Unmanaged email marketing. This type of email marketing is suitable for those who want all the functionality offered by high-end email marketing solutions such as Subscribe, but simply don't want to take on any of the technical responsibility, though have a certain level of technical know-how.

The main advantage of this type of solution is that you only pay for every email you send. It has low start up costs and you can have an implementation within minutes.

The down side of using a low cost Outsourced Self Service email marketing solution is that your email is being broadcast from the same server and IP address as many other users. If a previous user sent spam, your email will be blocked as spam. The second problem occurs when you need advice. Many of the email marketing firms that offer unmanaged email marketing don't have the financial margins to offer best one-to-one advice on how to best create an email template and how to fix faults in your HTML. This is a service for the technically capable or those sending less than 10,000 emails per month.

OUTSOURCED MANAGED EMAIL MARKETING
Using an Advertising Agency or Email Marketing Agency has its advantages. This option requires no in-house technical knowledge and the person on the other end of the phone in the agency is able to answer every question. This option is typically used by larger organisations that simply wish to deploy email marketing as a part of an overall marketing campaign or wish to ship the entire function of email marketing onto the experts. The true advantage of this type of service is speed of getting your message to market with
zero delays from any internal department. All technical requirements are the responsibility of the Agency and Marketing executives are left to do what they do best. Then main disadvantage of this type of email marketing is that it is costly as it requires manpower in the Agency. If budget permits and your customer data does not need to be kept private then this is a viable option.

IN-HOUSE EMAIL MARKETING
If you are sending over 10,000 emails per month, In-House email marketing is probably the most cost effective and controlled type of email marketing you can deploy. Purchase a product such as Subscribe and host it on a web server in your own network or simply rent a server in a server farm from around $99 (£60) per month. Host Subscribe on this server and
utilise its functionally remotely using your web browser. ION Technologies are your technical eyes, ears and hands and will manage all of your technical problems should they arise. The disadvantage of using this type of solution is that the capital cost is higher in comparison to an Outsourced Unmanaged solution; although this argument tends to vanish as the number of emails being sent increases, as there is no cost per email on this type of
solution. The advantages other than zero cost per email include increased data security; better white listing options resulting in higher delivery rates; and better branding as all emails come from your domain name.

There are a few fundamental questions that, when answered will easily
point you in the right direction to find your ideal email marketing solution. The following pointers will help you make a decision on the solution that best suits your needs.

OPT-IN REQUIREMENTS
The Opt-In email subscriber is the most valuable kind of customer or potential customer you can target. Someone that is already aware of your brand, product or service and has given you active consent to target them with your marketing material is the perfect person to receive your email
marketing. To promote and automate the opt- in process it is important that visitors to your web site have every opportunity to sign up.

Desktop software and Unmanaged Outsourced email marketing do not
traditionally offer any integration with your web site or other business systems to facilitate the collection of visitor or customer demographics. This type of functionality is usually only available to those who pay for a Managed service or purchase their own email marketing software, such as Subscribe.

QUANTITIES, FREQUENCY & PRICE

Out of the four choices illustrated earlier [Desktop, Outsourced Managed and
Unmanaged and In-House email marketing], it is helpful to categorise the most beneficial solution depending on the volume of emails being sent in a single month.

A Desktop email marketing solution can work for less than 1,000 emails per month. It must be remembered however that you will not get integrated detailed reporting or manage the bounces and unsubscribe requests efficiently. This is a solution for the one-man-band type of company with an extremely tight budget.

Outsourced Self Service email marketing is a great way for small to medium enterprises to enter into email marketing. It usually means low, or no capital investment and you only pay for the emails you send. It is substantially less expensive than a Managed solution and offers much better feedback than a Desktop solution. It does however start to become much more cost effective to move to an In- House email marketing solution when sending over 10,000 emails per month.

Outsourced Managed email marketing will scale depending on the infrastructure deployed by the agency running your campaigns on your behalf. This volume of emails that can be sent is limitless, as the price charged by the agency will also scale to cover their investment in equipment and bandwidth. Quite often this is a suitable scenario for very large companies who don't mind paying as the numbers increase, as it indicates success if the lists and broadcasts are growing. The downside is that it is hard to budget at the start of the year for cost, as this will vary depending on success criteria.

In-House email marketing is for organisations that wish to own the email
broadcasting solution. Typically organisations that choose this route need to keep their client data safe and improve deliverability rates. This type of solution overtakes the efficiencies of an Outsourced Unmanaged email marketing solution at volumes above 10,000 emails per month. It is often chosen if internal corporate systems are to integrate with the email
broadcast solution. Although this can be achieved using an external Managed
outsourced solution, it tends to be easier if all of the hardware and software are both under the control of the IT department.

PRIVACY & CONTROL
Passing your client data onto a third party can be a dodgy business especially if you are outsourcing your email marketing to an agency that dabbles in selling lists. There is only one sure-fire way of keeping your data
secure and that is to purchase your own In- House email marketing solution. This doesn't mean it has to physically sit in your office, it can sit on an web server in any data centre, but what it does mean is that it is exclusively
your software that no-one else gets to use and you have 100% guarantee that your data is safe.

It could be argued that a Outsourced Managed email marketing solution will be safe as contracts of usage and personal relationships are maintained. This is only safe as long as any of the internal managers within the agency don't take a liking to your list or as long as the relationship is friendly and
contracts are respected.

TECHNICAL ABILITY

If you have an In-House technical team, then implementing your own email marketing software will give you all of the privacy, control and cost advantages that come with this type of email marketing. If, on the other hand, you don't want to involve your IT department it is likely that you will have to go with the Outsourced Managed agency model. The cost of the latter may be substantially higher, but the responsibility of datamanagement,
managing suppression lists, unsubscribes and reporting will be the responsibility of the outsource agency chosen.

It must be noted that an In-House email marketing solution does not always require an IT department to manage or maintain it, but usually requires their consent to implement.

An Outsourced Self Service email marketing solution often requires a similar amount of IT support to an In-House email marketing solution.

SCALABILITY

Naturally, a Desktop email marketing solution does not scale.

If you are outsourcing your email marketing, the scalability question is not your concern as it is presumed that the outsourcing agency will want to scale up and charge more as your email marketing requirements increase.

An In-House email marketing solution will also scale. A typical solution tends to be able to broadcast around 500,000 emails per campaign on a single server before requiring an upgrade. As there is no cost per email with an In-House solution this is the only thing that may need to be budgeted for. A second server can easily be added to an In-House email marketing environment, thus doubling the capacity.

GUARANTEED PRIVACY OF DATA
Using your own email marketing software ensures that your customer data is kept safe. Everything from producing a corporate e-zine to company invoicing, all records will be under your own control.

BETTER BRANDING
As the emails will be coming from your own chosen domain, Subscribe is capable of handling multiple domains. This means that all emails are generated with all links, bounce addresses and reply addresses branded by
your domain.

EASY TO BUDGET

An In-House email marketing solution has a fixed cost. The capital cost and then usually a hosting cost if not in your own internal network. This cost does not change on email volume and in year two it can save you thousands compared to outsourcing.

IT'S ALL JUST AS YOU LEFT IT
As you are in charge of the system, all data, reports and other records are just were you left them. When you return there is no need to upload renewed suppression lists or subscriber lists, the software is yours and the
automated subscribe/unsubscribe and profile management systems ensure that your lists are kept clean.

FLEXIBLE AND CONFIGURABLE
Many larger organisations or email marketing agencies use Subscribe to manage multiple departments or clients. An in-house email marketing solution gives you the power and control to set up multiple user groups, lists
and templates, awarding permission to view and use. The optional approval system will allow you to let others get on with the business of email marketing while the system super user signs off campaigns.

SCALEABLE AND ROBUST
An In-House email marketing solution is extremely robust and scaleable. Many millions of emails can be sent from a single low spec server. Many millions of subscribers can be managed from a single instance of your email
marketing software and when the database seems like it is getting big, either clear out old historical data using the web interface or add another server to the split the load.

OPEN ARCHITECTURE AND INTEGRATES WITH EXISITING SYSTMES
Subscribe Email Marketing Software is developed using an open source programming language. The software integrates with many popular databases including MS SQL, DB2 and MySQL. This makes it an ideal solution
for companies wishing to integrate their existing systems, permitting seamless data interchange and feedback.

WHITE LISTING & EMAIL DELIVERY
Many organisations are often duped into outsourcing their email marketing because they feel that they don't have the ability to get White Listed and perform their own email marketing. White Listing is a technique deployed by many ISP's to ensure that authentic email marketers are permitted to deliver large volumes of email to their network. Many outsource agencies claim to have a special relationship with the larger ISP's such as AOL,Hotmail and Yahoo.

The reality is that anyone can gain white list status with these organisations. For example, AOL will grant white list status to an email marketer as long as they have a properly configured domain name, mail server and the ability to take spam complaints from AOL and act upon them.

Hotmail and Yahoo request that a mail server has an SPF record (Sender Policy Framework). This is a 10-minute job to set-up when registering the domain name you're going to be sending email broadcasts from. For a more
in-depth discussion on this topic, please feel free to call ION Technologies and let us share our experiences with you.

OPEN RATES ARE AN ACCURATE STATISTIC OF READERSHIP
With any email marketing campaign comes the statistic of OPEN RATE. This is supposed to indicate the number of people that have actually viewed an email. The reality is that this number is usually well under the true figure.

Open rates can only be tracked within HTML emails. Links clicked can be tracked within Text and HTML emails. With the proliferation of the Blackberry and the rollout of the latest version of the Microsoft email client Outlook,
many open rates are not being detected. This is because many mobile devices view the text alternative version of the email, something that
is impossible to track as an open rate while the Outlook email client blocks the download of graphics until the user selects to download the graphics. Only when the user selects to view the graphics within a HTML email in
Outlook will the open rate be registered. This means that the recipient can read the entire email without having registered they have opened it.

The fact of the matter is that open rates are usually much higher than displayed in email marketing reports whereas click through rates are 100% accurate.

BIGGER LISTS MEANS BETTER RESULTS
Spam is the scourge of the internet and gives authentic email marketers a bad name. Saying a list is an opt-in list is simply not true if the subscriber did not ask for information on your chosen subject. If you purchase or
borrow an opt-in list, the question needs to be asked, what did these users opt-in for?

The myth that more emails means better results is simply not true. The reality is that you will be sending spam if you don't have the users consent. The truth is that a focused email marketing campaign to fewer recipients
within your interest group yields much higher return and success than a broad blanket email campaign. Not only are the returns higher, the reality is that you will annoy fewer people including ISP's.

"THIS REQUIRES THE IT DEPARTMENT"
Assuming you're not using Desktop software, email marketing does not need to be complicated or require in-house IT expertise. Many Outsourced and In-House email- marketing solutions have template builders for the easy creation of HTML templates. The provider of an In-House email marketing
solution can also provide a web server to host the application, much the same way as a web Design Company can host a web site.

TRANSPARENCY IS KEY
Many organisations are often duped into outsourcing their email marketing because they feel that they don't have the ability to get White Listed and able to perform their own email marketing. White Listing is a technique
deployed by many ISP's to ensure that authentic email marketers are permitted to deliver large volumes of email to their network. Many outsource agencies claim to have a special relationship with the larger ISP's such
as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo.

The reality is that anyone can gain white list statues with these organisations. For example, AOL will grant white list status to an email marketer as long as they have a properly configured domain name, mail server and a ability to take spam complains from AOL and act upon them.

Hotmail and Yahoo request that a mail server has an SPF record (Sender Policy Framework). This is a 10-minute job to set-up when registering the domain name your going to be sending email broadcasts from. For a more in- depth discussion on this topic, please feel free to call ION Technologies and let us share our experiences with you.

RESPECT THE BOUNCE
When sending an email broadcast, it is almost always certain to produce hard and soft email bounces. Many organisations are reluctant to remove hard bounces from their email lists and can keep sending to these permanently dead email addresses. The misunderstanding is that this practice of not cleansing lists properly is not doing any harm. The reality is different however.

AOL for example will remove white list status from an organisation if they repeatedly try to send to AOL recipients with greater than 10% failure in the list. By sending to dead addresses, you are taking up valuable resource of the ISP, and they simply don't like it.

The moral of the story is to keep your lists clean. Don't fool yourself that you have many more subscribers than you actually do