As a marketing executive for an Internet retailer, it’s a good habit to ask what you want to accomplish from your next email marketing campaign. One or more of the following categories can be used as a strategy or objective to drive your next campaign.

• Branding or awareness
• New customer engagement
• Demand generation
• Up-sell or cross-sell
• Re-engage dormant customers
• Pre/post – purchase communications
• Encourage purchase completion
• Promote partner offers

These could be fresh campaigns created from scratch or automated/trigger campaigns that kick in because of customer’s actions or lack thereof.

Please remember that we are not talking about email blasts here that go out to everyone on the list on a regular basis. Instead, these are well thought out campaigns with clear goals targeted at specific segments of your customer base and can be effectively measured during as well as at the end of the campaign. We strongly believe that having these categories will help the marketing executive of an Internet retailer effectively use email as a vehicle to retain customer base and grow revenues in a cost effective way.