Looking forward, online presents a raft of new possibilities. For example, it would be possible to send 'quitters' timed alerts via SMS reminding them when to change their patch. And as part of the process of acquiring new quitters, NiQuitin CQ could even decide to establish an authoritative presence on the Web which smokers could go to when first considering 'why and how' they should give up. The brand could even own a branded editorial column in the smoking sections of leading healthcare portals, just a click away from the NiQuitin website.

All of this enhanced capability can be delivered at a fraction of the cost and at far greater speed when compared with a purely offline solution.

The Internet now means that you have little excuse for not knowing more about your customers and what they want. The result in some categories is that the marketing emphasis is beginning to shift away from a sales 'push' agenda and move towards a more customer focused 'sales pull' service agenda. A leading technology company services their customers and prospects by providing self-customised e-newsletters. The customer selects content areas of interest to create their own newsletter, with choices operating at a detailed level right down to the equipment they own and their specific IT interests. They then automate the serving of thousands of different iterations of the same newsletter with different combinations of copy to meet different audience needs. This is marketing on the customer's terms – by speaking the customer's language, the marketer can start to take his hands off the steering wheel and let the customers play a more active part in driving the communications and sales process.

For Friskies, Nestlé's pet food manufacturing division, the customer has a reason to engage. A nutritional calculator at www.friskies-petcare.com offers them free advice on the right diet for their particular pet. The customer enters the age, weight, exercise routine and so on, and a balanced diet is recommended. By helping the customer learn about the best food types for his pet, the marketer helps the customer to engage with an increasingly complex product portfolio by delivering a more positive and personally relevant brand experience.

The way in which the Internet has dramatically improved the 'fluency' of relationship marketing is showcased by Cisco. Cisco tracks customers' and prospects' behaviour as they reach their website. By monitoring navigation choices it is clear which of the two target segments their site visitors fall into: technical or business decision makers. Asked to register their preferences to access protected information, a short series of questions map the prospect within a segmentation model. A different course of action is taken for each set. Hot leads are asked if they'd like to be contacted by a sales representative. Warm leads are sent a free CD-ROM demonstrating the particular solution they expressed interest in. Cold leads, who may be interested in buying next year, are asked if they would like to receive a newsletter keeping them up-to-date with IT issues and trends. The entire process is automated.

In this sense companies' websites act as a fulcrum for inbound and outbound relationship management initiatives. Strategies are often very transparent. Ogilvy's eCompetitor Scan approach is used to evaluate websites for customer management capability. It uses a simple scoring model against a question set. The evaluation includes whether it is possible to order a brochure online, if the customer can use a call-me button to be contacted by a sales representative and whether there is an opt-in e-mail programme with a clear value proposition.

E-mail programmes are becoming a critical component of relationship marketing's new-found fluency. E-mail can be delivered at a twentieth of the delivery cost of direct mail, with a much lower proportion of costs being allocated to third party external costs such as printing, letter shop and postal costs – which of course presents the opportunity to increase customer communications activity without needing to increase budgets. Moreover speed/timeliness and turnaround times are improved dramatically.

The cycle time for producing an e-mail is typically one to two weeks, compared to months for a printed mailing. Typically 90% of all customer responses will be received within the first two days of an e-mail campaign, compared to several weeks for direct mail. Better still, nearly everything can be measured – who opened the e-mail (for html), which links they clicked on, how many times they clicked, where they went on the website, how long they spent there. So e-mail is not just exploiting long established direct marketing principles, it is also evolving and developing them.

Another example is the realisation that for the first time ever, the cost of distribution is so low that there is absolutely no economic barrier to contacting large volumes of customers with personalised messages using one to one media.

David Ogilvy once said that the most important word in the world of advertising was 'test'. E-mail is an excellent channel to test target groups, creative executions, propositions and offers (even for other media such as postal mail and direct response press) given the low cost of execution and high speed of response.