Do firms know when enough is enough with email marketing?

Other brands bombard people with email, evidently having decided that quantity over quality is what matters. But poor, scattergun emailing ends up costing you money as people will delete or, worse, unsubscribe.

Responsible brands will only send emails when people have opted in, but those that email too often risk being classified as spam by consumers. This can damage their brand, as well as ruining email as a marketing channel for the rest of us.

At Panasonic we are conscious of the cumulative effect of brands emailing, so we keep our emails relevant and targeted to ensure customers don't receive any unwanted emails.

But you can do email cleverly. For instance, Panasonic doesn't send one-size-fits-all emails, but rather we segment our database based on the preferences customers have given us. We monitor the open and click-through rates of our email campaigns and, of course, the response. If those open rates are dropping, then we would take action.

We wouldn't dream of blitzing people with email. Our database is hard fought and grown at a cost. The last thing we want to have is people unsubscribing.

NO - LOUISE HOLAH, CRM manager, Eurostar: Almost all of our CRM is online, and in our experience, the email medium isn't dying. In fact, the reverse appears to be happening: it's so easy for customers to opt out of emails they don't want that clients are having to become more strategic and sophisticated.

Clients need to make considerable efforts to ensure sure they don't email their customers and prospects too frequently, and one of the best ways is by testing and segmenting their target market. Different audiences can tolerate receiving different levels of email contact, and thorough testing is essential to assess the optimum contact for each audience.

At Eurostar we have found that a strong creative theme can overcome any potential annoyance by providing the recipient with a few minutes of fun, which both stimulates and engages them.

The use of email will continue to grow, prompted in no small part by businesses trying to lower their use of direct mail and, therefore, increase their efforts to be more environmentally friendly in marketing communications.

Most of our CRM activity is online, and when we do use offline channels, we ask for email addresses to allow us to contact customers by email in the future.

As with any medium, if email is used without any thought behind it and with dull creative sent to the entire database, then it will, quite rightly, annoy people. But at Eurostar we don't see that happening. In our experience, the use of email is improving all the time, and we continue to achieve great results and feedback from our e-CRM activity.

MAYBE - SIMONE BARRATT, Managing Director, e-Dialog: Overuse, misuse, abuse: they are all rife in the email marketing world. But email works - ROI figures from our clients and the DMA are becoming ever more impressive, and prove that some consumers respond extremely positively to the medium.

The channel is clearly alive and kicking: investment in email marketing is increasing exponentially, and integration with new channels such as RSS and mobile will further help marketers leverage its strengths.

But because of its ubiquity, there's a perception that email is easy. As well as this, its low-cost allocation in the marketing budget means it doesn't always get the attention it deserves.

Even legitimate businesses still can't stop themselves from sending too-frequent, often-irrelevant messages. If these messages manage to make it through the ISPs, the result is that consumers' inboxes are overflowing with marketing messages.

To cut through the clutter, marketers need to get smart. This means managing and maintaining their email reputation with consumers and ISPs by maintaining a highly deliverable list, sending well-targeted, mailings and ensuring the recipients' privacy.

It's also vital for the success of the medium that marketers continue to look for ways in which to better target consumers - through segmentation, personalisation, triggering/sequencing, testing, lifecycle targeting and interactivity.

Used effectively, the channel and its rewards will continue to grow. Abuse it and your customers - not the medium - will make the decision for you.