ClickZ: Leveraging One-to-One E-Mail Marketing

I've been paying attention to email marketing for a long time, and most companies do a really crap job of it. The direct marketing approach to email is so tired and futile in the face of spam. For a while now, I've been yammering that the true killer app for email is CRM. This case study is a brilliant example of that. Cisco, working with H2F Media, Kirshenbaum Bond and Ogilvy & Mather, has designed a system to let sales people extend their role as "trusted advisors" and "brand stewards" by sending personalized templated emails to customers and prospects, to which they can track open and response rates. And guess what: response rates are 11 times more effective than their previous batch-and-blast campaigns. Of course. If you receive and email from someone you know and have a business relationship with, you're much more likely to engage compared to the opt-in dreck most companies send out by the bucketload.