One of the often-forgotten staples of internet marketing is email.  More than 60 billion emails are sent each day worldwide.  Even some people without regular internet access have email accounts that they check at every opportunity.  But with the popularity of instant messaging, social networking, and mobile text messages, email sometimes gets left at the wayside.

Direct email marketing isn't anything new.  Almost as soon as email began to become a regular part of the internet, marketers and website owners started using the medium as a way to reach customers.  Unfortunately, almost as soon as marketers started using email for legitimate marketing purposes, some started using it for mass, unsolicited spamming purposes.  The latter has made some companies wary of using email for marketing purposes.

But at least one high-dollar fashion website is using direct email marketing in beneficial and encouraging ways.

MarketingSherpa reports on the successes of Vivre Inc, an online and print catalog retailer of designer clothing and accessories.  Using email, Vivre is able to run multiple marketing campaigns custom tailored to different segments of their customer base.  Vivre doesn't use analytics to track its customers but, instead, relies on shopping trends recorded by its checkout process to create email lists of customer segments.

Overall, the company is already quite successful.  With company sales doubling four out of the past five years and catalog subscribership of 1.2 million people, Vivre is obviously pretty good at what they do.  To capitalize on their success, Vivre decided to create four different email marketing projects, each directed at a different subset of their customer base.  As reported by MarketingSherpa, the company uses bold, magazine-style email layouts that look more like pages of their catalog than just another email.

Of the four campaigns initiated, Vivre was pleased with the results of three and will use the data collected from the fourth less successful campaign to further customize and target their email marketing initiatives.  The company's emails had an open rate of anywhere between 38.2% to 15.2%, depending on the campaign.  Between 15.9% and 3.9% of the various customer segments clicked-through the email to arrive at the company's website.  And of those visiting the website through the emails, between 8.9% and 1.2% converted to purchases.

Excluding the low performing campaign, Vivre was very successful with their email marketing program.  And although it didn't translate into huge sales, the less successful campaign provided valuable information that the company can use for future promotions.

Don't stop tweaking your search ads and sponsored listings.  Don't cut budgets on your keyword bids.  But don't forget the power and marketing potential of email.