The Eng@ged Customer: The New Rules of Internet Direct Marketing by Hans Peter Brondmo

Given the publishing date of The Eng@ged Customer, it would have been written just before the dot.bomb meltdown. My goal was to find out whether or not this bad boy should be relegated to the climate-controlled section in the library where they keep the other ancient historical tomes.

Plenty of Internet marketing books are outdated as soon as they hit your local pulp warehouse/java shop. In this case, however, e-mail has changed very little since it was first invented, although the environment in which it lives has changed dramatically.

E-mail is now more ubiquitous and intimate than ever, facilitating your procurement of 3/8′ ball bearings as handily as updates on your colleague’s ski trip debauch. This makes The Eng@ged Customer more relevant than when it was written, since the more intimate the medium, the more judicious you have to be in its use.

Brondmo starts with a discussion of the psychological factors that impact e-mail marketing and its use in creating and maintaining customer relationships. He then outlines specific tactics, goals and objectives that e-mail marketing can be used to execute. A more rigorous and detailed ROI methodology component to this section would have been appreciated, although it does have a useful flow chart to track costs.

The next section sets up a plan for actually doing customer dialogue, with lots of great checklists and useful case studies.

The final section does some crystal ball gazing about the future of e-mail marketing that some may find useful, particularly if one is interested in thinking about how e-mail could possibly get more ubiquitous.

Brondmo is a powerhouse in this industry and he speaks from considerable experience. The Eng@ged Customer is a useful resource for anyone interested in either starting an eDM program from scratch or double-checking to see if they’re missing anything in an existing eDM program.

BookMark Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Mark Szabo is an account director with Parallel Strategies in Calgary. He can be reached at mark.szabo@parallel.ca.