Creating an email campaign, in today’s information age, is one of the most difficult exercises in the suite of online marketing and promotion tools. As can be imagined, one of the biggest problems that face most newsletter campaigns directed towards driving online sales is the ability to target the correct audience. The tool that makes this task much easier is email campaign software. This software makes email marketing a more precise art by targeting only users that would be interested in receiving communication regarding the product.

Users do this by signing up during software installations in a wizard, registering for an online service or a portal, or any other activity in which their information is collected and their interest in receiving further communication is explicitly stated. The data is then stored in a server and then can be used to disseminate any information in a newsletter format. One of the most familiar of these types of communication is the newsletter from most news agencies’ portals. Fundamentally, the objective of these newsletters is to drive back traffic to the portal or website from where the sale or further information would be executed.

The question then is: what makes a good email campaign? How would one optimize the effect of a powerful tool like email campaign software? The answer lies in some of the basics of marketing and specifically advertising. If you sit back and try to jot down the number of memorable advertisements or offline marketing campaigns, you would notice that those that are theme-based are probably the most successful. Of course, whether a theme is really required is something that is dictated by the nature of the product itself. This is because many products do not require a promotion because of their very nature. A good example is salt. Between one brand of salt and the other, the only thing that you probably need to successfully sell a brand is smart packaging and one line of text stating an added benefit or lowered price. However, since the online medium rarely has to deal with products of these kind, theme-based campaigns are gaining more ground.

Another important aspect that is useful in isolation but powerful coupled with thematic advertising is multimedia. The more widespread availability of Broadband now means that people have greater access to heavier media. This is a crucial aspect of the web experience today. Therefore, using multimedia in the form of flash movies in the email campaign makes the marketing effort much more effective.

Email campaign software also needs attention but more from the perspective of an updated database and the veracity of the user profiles. Crucially, a creative challenge lies in ensuring that the database grows, matures, and is cleansed of users that just take up space instead of converting to paying customers.