These days I receive a lot of electronic Christmas cards greeting me and wishing me happy New Year.

I must confess that the vast majority of them are not very good from the e-mail marketing point of view, and not a lot of them caught my attention. However recently I received one from one of our providers that really was interesting to watch.

It is a viral campaign from the bank ING Direct and UNICEF, in the form of Christmas e-Card that uses a cool flash website and geo-positioning  to help a good cause and was called "The Solidarity Bus".

Sorry, the contents are in Spanish

ING will donate 1 euro cent to UNICEF for each 10 kilometers that this virtual bus run through the world, which is a strange claim to do in an email, isn't it?

How is this done: when you click in the call to action link and get to the landing page at http://www.elautobus.org they get your geographic position from your IP address. The compare it with the position of the original sender of the email (tracked in the link) so that they can calculate approximately the distance between the two points and add the quantity corresponding to this distance.

Cool, isn't it? Technically and socially cool, I must say :-)

Please, use this e-Card and send it to your friends in the other part of the world so that a lot of children can go to school.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

I like to emphasize the versatility of e-mail marketing to promote our products or  services. The key will be more in contents than in the tool you use to communicate.

If you're thinking about making an e-mail marketing campaign, look  for what is your marketing message:

-If you are selling products. Remember that the consumers see the physical characteristics of the products. You can talk about added value and services that they will buy too.

-If you are selling services. Try to make something ethereal and intangible into something real. Consumers will not perceive that they buy smoke.

In both cases, offer several options to the consumer, because we like choose.

Apply the flexibility that characterizes e-mail marketing to your relationship with your customers. It will help you to redesign an old or false perception about them.

We have already told about the many advantages of e-mail marketing opposite to other tools communication. Today I am going to talk about form.

We can show the content of our e-marketing  in "wrappers" as:

• Offers
• News
• Newsletter
• Subscriptions
• Invitations
• Polls 
• Specific formats for specific season, such as Christmas cards

The choice depends on what we want to say to our target and the kind of customers in our database.

We need to explore different ways of communication. We must try to get thar our recipients understand the message. E-mail marketing will adapt to any of them!