E-Mail and Web Marketing

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Marketing Today, Issue 32, April 23, 1997

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This article contains older information. Go here for newer information on e-mail marketing.

A Web animation loads and then flutters, the front flap of a rural mailbox icon opening and closing three times per second, like a mindless dog, lapping endlessly. "Send me mail, send me mail," the pathetic mailbox beckons. "Go somewhere else, go somewhere else," says a little message in my brain which activates the index finger on my mouse button to click and depart.

But despite the lapping of annoying mailboxes, I believe that learning to use e-mail effectively can be one of the most important tools in marketing a business on the Web. If no one contacts you after visiting your Web site, why have it there at all? To move you past e-mail response links you need to learn about some other technologies. (Some of these require some experience; ask your Web site designer or Internet Service Provider to set these up for you.)

Forms-to-Email

While I encourage clients to include an e-mail response link on every Web page in their system, I believe that a response form is vital to gaining information about clients. The response form is powered by a CGI* program which resides on your Internet Service Provider's computer. The program takes information from your form and instantly sends it to you in a nicely formatted e-mail message.

Forms are vital, since they ask for various kinds of contact information. If you rely on merely e-mail response links on your page, people will forget to give their phone number and address. With a form, you can also ask multiple-choice "qualifying questions" to see how serious a prospect is. Of course, forms can also be used for ordering products, when used with SSL Web server security and PGP e-mail encryption to ensure safety of credit card information.

Aliases

I said "alias" not "alien." You learned about aliases from Dragnet and aliens from Star Trek. Keep them straight! An alias is an e-mail address you go by in another life. Let me explain. Many times the Web server host you choose will be different than your local dial-up Internet Service Provider.

Of course, I can set up multiple aliases with my Utah Web host, each for a different purpose. A business might use info@domainname.com, as well as sales@, support@, jimdandy@, and dozens of others. Each alias can be forwarded to a different local e-mail address -- or all to the same address if you like. This is how you can distribute e-mail to different individuals at your company.

I hope that after this discussion aliases won't be alien to you. Ask your Web host provider about them.

Filters

Of course, if on your Web site you invite people to send e-mail to you, you may receive more than you can handle. For that you need an industrial-strength e-mail program like Eudora Pro 3.0 which offers filters. Let's say you get too much junk mail. You set up a filter that looks for multiple dollar signs and uses the words "fabulous" or "rich" and it will automatically put such e-mail into straight into the trash. ;-) Of course, filters help organize the e-mail from your Web site as well. The filter can look for a key word on the Subject line, or for one of your aliases, and put all mail with that name into a separate folder.

Databases

Let's say you are collecting information from a survey, or names and addresses of visitors. You can set up a program that automatically enter this information into a database on your Web site, which you can download occasionally for merging into your desktop database. E-mail to database programs are becoming more and more popular. (See PolyForm and Survey Internet in the sidebar to this article.) Once in a database you can study the responses from many different angles, and learn a lot about your Web visitors.

Autoresponders

Sometimes you desire to distribute information from your Web site by means of e-mail. The more information you can distribute automatically, the more time you save. There are several ways of doing this. The first is an autoresponder or autobot. This kind of program automatically sends a specified text via e-mail whenever it receives an e-mail message. The more sophisticated programs will send different messages depending upon the word placed in the Subject field. Ask your Internet Service Provider about setting one up for you. Typically they cost $5 to $15 per month.

A second method involves using a forms-to-email CGI program such as Cgiemail (see sidebar). You place the information you want to distribute -- say prices or product features -- into a text file on your Web server. Whenever a visitor places his e-mail address into a form on your Web page and presses the submit button, your text is automatically sent to him.

If you have Eudora Pro 3.0, you can use filters and the "stationery" feature to automatically send out responses from your desktop computer whenever a certain word or phrase appears in an e-mail message to you. For example, one of my forms allow visitors to request prices. Eudora's filter searches for the phrase "E-mail prices to me" in the body of all incoming messages, and automatically replies with prices, while sorting the prospect's e-mail in a special folder for my attention.

Subscriptions

Another powerful way to extend your Web site marketing strategy is to allow people visiting your Web site to subscribe to an e-mail newsletter. On multiple pages in my site, I invite visitors to place their e-mail address in a form box and press the "Subscribe Me" button. The Cgiemail forms-to-email program automatically sends an e-mail message to the Majordomo program which keeps the Web Marketing Today mailing list, and -- voila! -- they become new subscribers. Every week hundreds of visitors do just that, and I am able to market to them -- to you -- issue after issue. Of course, your newsletter had better offer valuable information, or people will bombard you with e-mail telling you to unsubscribe them. Make sure you give clear instructions on how they can unsubscribe themselves in each newsletter to minimize the unsubscriptions you have to process by hand.

If you're just getting started, you can use Eudora to manage your mailing list. Set up an alias (there's that word again) which contains all the e-mail addresses of your subscribers. Just make sure you put their addresses in the Bcc: field (blind carbon copy) so all the e-mail addresses aren't visible to your subscribers.

Another form of subscription can be to a Discussion List. This function is also run by Majordomo or similar mailing list manager program which resides on your Web host computer. In this type of list, Majordomo echoes one participant's message to all other participants automatically. In this form of e-mail marketing, you might act as moderator of a discussion of your industry or installing a particular product. As the number of subscribers to the list increases, you gain a reputation for being an expert in the field, and can subtly market your products and services in that role.

E-mail can bring in a significant amount of business if you learn how to incorporate it into your Web marketing strategy. Don't put it off. But do me a favor, please. Don't use one of those forever-lapping mailbox icons to point me to it!

* CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, the interface between the Web pages themseles, and programs which run on the Web server computer itself; aren't you glad you know?

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Sidebar: Forms-to-Email CGI Programs

The are several excellent forms-to-email CGI programs, some freeware, some for purchase.

Cgiemail, a freeware program written by Bruce Lewis at MIT, is a great forms-to-email programs for Unix operating systems. Once the program is installed on the ISP's computer in a cgi-bin directory, e-mail messages are formatted via a simple text file alongside your Web pages, no programming required.

FormMail.pl is written by Matt Wright in Perl, and can be installed easily on most Unix, NT, and Windows 95 Web servers, though it isn't quite as versatile as Cgiemail.

PolyForm, which sells for $149 from O'Reilly Software, requires the Web server to run on a Windows 95 or Windows NT operating system. It allows you to take data from a form and insert it directly into a Windows-compatible database such as Microsoft Access.

Survey Internet, for purchase from Aufrance Associates, allows both entry into, and queries from, a dynamic Microsoft Access database. Requires a Windows NT server.

Ask your Internet Service Provider or Web host provider if they provide Majordomo or another mailing list manager program. You can learn more about setting up a Majordomo newsletter from my article "Majordomo Newsletters for the Novice."