12/6/99 Sydney Morning Herald 43
1999 WL 29632492
Sydney Morning Herald
Copyright of John Fairfax Group Pty Ltd
Monday, December 6, 1999
A Little Customer Respect Goes A Long Way
By Katrina Nicholas
Software makers and IT consultants are promoting "permission
marketing" the latest in a long line of IT industry buzz words as a
way to help direct marketers boost sales and cut costs without annoying
customers with unsolicited junk e-mails.
Mr Ray Jarratt, managing director of Sydney permission marketing
company Fforesite, whose clients include AMP, Kraft, Coca-Cola and
Pacific Power, said properly conducted online advertising could generate
response rates as high as 40 per cent, while spamming had a response
rate of 2 per cent.
"Increasingly, the capacity to do e-commerce depends on how
[corporations] behave," Mr Jarratt said. "Traditional forms of online
advertising are becoming highly ineffective."
Permission marketing, where customers opt to receive e-mails which are
specifically tailored for them, works on the premise that everything on
the Internet is essentially a conversation between two parties and, for
a relationship to develop, each party must trust and respect the other.
From this then, it is considered bad Internet manners for companies to
send junk e-mail to their customers.
Research from US group Forrester found that compared to average
click-through rates of 0.65 per cent for banner ads on the Internet,
opt-in email received an average response rate of 18 per cent. The
report also found that companies could lower costs by more effective
e-marketing.
The e-mail advertising arena in the US is already a hotly contested one
with players such as Exchange Applications, YesMail, 24/7 Media,
NetCreations and newcomer DoubleClick, which last Monday released its
first e-mail advertising products, competing for market share.
Boston's Exchange Applications has become the first to concentrate on
the local market, releasing eXstatic software designed to allow
companies to e-market more efficiently.
Exchange Applications' existing Australian clients include Citigroup,
Vodafone, the Credit Union Services Corp of Australia and one of the
four major banks.
Asia-Pacific general manager Mr Ian Tavener said Exchange Applications
would primarily target eXstatic at telecoms and financial institutions.
US users included Drugstore.com, Citigroup and theglobe.com.
Exchange Applications will allow local companies to either purchase
the eXstatic software outright or rent it from the Internet, with the
rental price depending on the volume of e-mail sent.
To date, permission marketing had been confined to "dot.com"
companies those with ready access to extensive e-mail databases, Mr
Tavener said.
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NEWS SUBJECT: Business Stories; Internet: World Wide Web; Internet (BZZ IWWW NET)
Word Count: 376
12/6/99 SMRNHLD 43
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