Date: January 20, 2005

Presenter: Lynn Hinderacker

Affiliation: OmegaPoint Marketing - omegapointmarketing.com

Guest speaker Lynn Hinderacker, President of OmegaPoint Marketing - omegapointmarketing.com - discussed Email Marketing and Fusion. Fusion is the blending of disparate parts to create a new entity. In this case, the blending of email marketing with niche oriented and mass appeal strategies to create an effective hybrid. A recent example was an email campaign for the Broadmoor Market which drew a phenomenal response rate for a promotional event. Additional information is available from the Flux article (PDF file).

The topic of email marketing has always been controversial due to privacy issues and abuse. AOL recently reported an reduction of spam due to more stingent applications of filtering systems and aggressive prosecution of spammers. The total daily email message volume for AOL actually decreased by over 30% in the past year. This downward trend, in general, may also be due to the corporate implementation of Microsoft Server 2003 this past year. The default setting of the server software includes spam policies that will discard messages or dump them into a special folder. Many organizations, such as ITC, have been impacted by these policies due to messages that can no longer get through to their intended recipients. While adjustments are being made on the management and technical levels, discussions on this topic that Mr. Hinderacker presents will be quite compelling.