In recent years, the exponential growth of the network of computer networks known as the Internet has also lead to enormous growth in the area of “on-line” advertising. One popular channel of on-line advertising has been e-mail.
Typically, entities have collected e-mail addresses from various sources, such as by manually collecting or using spiders or bots to collect e-mail addresses from news groups or auction sites on the Internet. They then broadcast or “spam” an identical, unsolicited marketing message to their collected list. Needless to say, these unsolicited messages annoy most recipients and result in very low response rates. Additionally, many recipients regard the “spam” as an invasion of their privacy. What is needed is a system that sends marketing messages only to those who “opt-in” and increases both the number of participants and/or the number of responses by offering incentives.