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Universally, marketers love to use e-mail marketing for nurturing and cultivating future opportunities with their target audiences.

On the other side, I've heard numerous speakers and bloggers declare e-mail marketing dead. That's simply not true.

E-mail is a one-to-one medium, nothing more, nothing less. The key is execution and relevance.

The development of an effective e-mail program depends on how much you know about your target audience and how well you use that information to tailor a relevant message.

For example, I get some numerous e-mails from companies that know me (in some cases I'm their customer!) but their e-mails don't show it. Their "creative" and graphics laden e-mail messages don't speak to my concerns at all. So each irrelevant message (my vendors and potential partners) send is basically programming me to delete future messages from them.

What's my point? Be relevant with each message. Your objective should be to take full advantage of the unique characteristics of e-mail in creating meaningful communication that is at once attention-getting and informative... in a style easily perceived to be directed exclusively to me, the recipient. It should feel like it came from a human being not a mailing list.

There are numerous tools that allow your e-mail messages to be customized based on database attributes. Here are a couple of good resources on e-mail marketing that came out this week:

BtoB Online: E-mail testing

If you have a larger audience, this article explains some testing concepts to improve your messages.

MarketingSherpa just released their annual report on e-mail marketing. I have yet to get a copy of the full report myself but I had a chance to read their free executive summary and there are some useful tips for B-to-B lead generation.

You can download a free executive summary here.

Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for "the complex sale."
Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.