E-MAIL MARKETING: RELATIONSHIP, NOT PERMISSION.

It was bound to happen: Commercial e-mail has turned into a badly overcrowded jungle. Marketers who once routinely achieved response rates of 10%-15% on their e-mail campaigns now feel lucky to pull 3%-5% from increasingly jaded prospects. And the competition for e-mail eyeballs is getting much tougher: Forrester Research predicts that the volume of commercial e-mail will triple in the next five years.

So what does it take to survive in the e-mail jungle these days?

The popular (and politically correct) theory is that the winners will be those who ask "permission" to send commercial e-mail to an individual's mailbox. In support of this theory, permission marketing guru Seth Godin points out--correctly--that so-called "opt-in" lists consistently yield higher response rates than spam-like lists of raw, unqualified names.

But we suspect the permission lobby misses an important point: It isn't the act of asking for permission that produces great results, but rather the relationship behind the grant of permission. In fact, most people don't even remember which opt-in lists they've joined: When they see an offer that looks like spam, they trash it (and sometimes even report the sender to the anti-spam cops). Relevant offers and trusted senders almost invariably pass the spam sniff test, even if the issue of permission has never come up.

As a practical matter, of course, relationships have to start somewhere. In fact, e-mail campaigns that target total strangers tend to be expensive and relatively ineffective; e-mail is typically not a great tool for new customer acquisition. (It's no accident that the most aggressive spammers always seem to be peddling pornography and get-rich-quick schemes, where there's not much expectation of a deep relationship.)

At the same time, it's possible to create relationship campaigns that reach well beyond a narrowly-defined group of installed-base customers. The seeds of a relationship are planted whenever someone visits a company's Web site, orders a demo copy, hears a trade show speaker, or even recognizes a product's brand name. A company's circle of "friends and family" is often surprisingly large, and most of the people in this extended circle don't object to e-mail that strengthens their ties to the company.

We've been looking at how to develop relationship-based e-mail campaigns, and we've come up with a few guidelines:

* Don't get pushy: Relationships take time to grow, even on Internet time. From the customer's perspective, a one-time transaction--a trialware download, say, or a single purchase--doesn't automatically create trust or confer the right to collect extensive profile information. Instead, it's important to build the relationship gradually, with e-mail newsletters, tips, surveys, discounts, seminar invitations, and other low-pressure offers that leave the customer with a sense of control over the relationship.

* Showcase a strong relationship benefit: Ideally, customers should want to stay on your e-mail list--for instance, to get free updates for products that are evolving rapidly, or to qualify for "membership" discounts. For software companies, an especially effective way to build a loyal e-mail list is by offering a regular tips-and-techniques newsletter. Anything that enhances a customer's successful use of a product (or service) is likely to be perceived as an especially compelling relationship benefit.

* Personalize the message: Demonstrating personal knowledge about the customer--for instance, by embedding the recipient's name in an e-mail- -can be a powerful reminder of a past relationship. Although personalization technology and data mining can get very elaborate, often the same impact can be achieved by sending standard e-mail messages to easily-identified customer segments. One example: When book buyers look like they might be drifting away, Amazon.com sends an e- mail that says, "We notice that you haven't shopped with us in a while..." and invites the recipient to visit the store again.

* Write like a human being: Tone and style matter a great deal in the e-mail world. Even when a relationship is well established, customers are less likely to feel a sense of intimacy when e-mail sounds like the voice of an anonymous corporation, bureaucratic and formal. We're more likely to feel engaged if we get a friendly-sounding note from Sally Jones in customer service or an "important message" from the CEO. Too much energy and enthusiasm can also be a turn-off: Hard-sell marketing pitches are as unwelcome as an insurance salesman who hands out business cards at a wedding.

* Respond to feedback: Personalization creates an illusion of one-to- one communication, so it's not surprising that an e-mail campaign will sometimes generate literally hundreds of tech support questions, feature requests, testimonials, address changes, and other random comments. No one in a company is ever eager to write personal answers to all these messages, but ignoring them can create a lot of bad feeling among people with an above-average interest in the company.

* Stay in touch: Relationships depend on reasonably frequent communication--typically, at least a half-dozen messages a year (preferably several brief, single-subject e-mails instead of a few less-frequent omnibus messages). But if there's nothing interesting to write about, don't crank out filler material just to meet a schedule. In the online world, no one has permission to be a bore.