195. Email Marketing › tools of the trade An email’s spam score can be checked at: http://spamassassin.apache.org An email’s reputation score can be checked at www.senderscore.org Once an email has been sent, results need to be analysed to pinpoint areas for growth for the next campaign. 7.6 pros and cons Permission-based email marketing can give the highest return on investment of any marketing activities. Technology allows mass customisation, allowing personalisation across a large list of subscribers. When used to foster relationships with a customer base, email marketing can go a long way to increasing the lifetime value of that customer. Email marketing is highly measurable, and databases are able to be easily and thoroughly segmented. However, with the increasing numbers of companies and individuals using email marketing, many consumers are email fatigued. It requires ingenuity, focus and dedication to maintain an email database and consistently deliver useful quality emails that will be read. It does not take much for email to be marked as spam, and it can be difficult to recover from being branded as a spammer by the ISPs. 7.7 summary Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that can render the best ROI of any digital marketing tactic. It is: • Highly targeted and customisable. • Cost effective. Gaining explicit permission to send email marketing to a person is a prerequisite for successful email marketing, however all emails sent by an organisation and the individuals in that organisation can be seen as marketing opportunities. Successful email marketing requires careful planning and testing. HTML emails need to be tested across a range of email clients, and should be tested for a spam score, before being deployed.192