"I couldn't believe the response," co-owner Richard Pannullo said. Customers preferred Coca-Cola products and said so in large numbers. The Winter Park, Fla., restaurant wasted no time in switching to Coke. The survey question not only helped the restaurant's owners make an important business decision, it also once again proved the value of e-mail as a low-cost form of target marketing.

Even very small businesses are finding that e-mail can easily generate repeat business and gather valuable customer feedback. Take Dave Mann, lead guitarist for FunkUs, a jam band that performs only once or twice a week and does not produce enough income to let most of its five members quit their day jobs.

FunkUs fires off a message to everyone on its e-mail list once or twice a month, depending on the band's schedule, Mann said. "It's mostly for our fans, to keep them informed" about where the band is playing, he said. Sending e-mail to 1,300 people is "a breeze," Mann said. "It's literally like sending an e-mail to one person."

The nonprofit Enzian Theater in Maitland, Fla., blasts an e-mail with information about the films it is showing to 1,750 members each week, said Shannon Lacek, director of marketing. While FunkUs and the Enzian stick to text messages, the fancy graphics that computer users are increasingly coming to expect and other refinements are available for a price.

There are agencies that will put together a slick e-mail package that includes the fancy look. For instance, IMK Group, a Winter Park ad agency, creates customized newsletter templates for clients, said partner Dori Madison. For $5,500 a year, IMK makes the templates, inserts content provided by the customer and transmits the package monthly to as many as 2,500 recipients, Madison said. That comes to less than $500 a month.

Pannullo's pays about $300 a month for a service that packages and transmits the content the owners want to use to about 5,000 customers. The restaurant's e-mail includes the kind of graphics one might see on a Web page and has links to the restaurant's Web site and elsewhere. The restaurant offers customers special e-mail discounts as an inducement to provide their e-mail addresses.

The Atlanta-based company that puts the e-mail together for Pannullo's, Restaurant eMarketing Inc., specializes in the restaurant industry and has numerous individual and multi-unit clients across the Eastern United States.

While do-it-yourselfers can get a simple text message out to thousands of customers virtually for free, a sophisticated service like Restaurant eMarketing provides some other benefits. Those include reliability of delivery and immediate reporting of such things as whether recipients are even opening the e-mails and which articles or links they are clicking on.

"At the end of the day it comes down to whether a restaurant has enough time and knowledge to effectively run an email markteing campaign," says Restaurant eMarketing. "Our research has showed that restaurants have extensive knowledge in the day-to-day operations of running their restaurant--but lack how to effectively run an email marketing program." Richard Pannullo, owner of Pannullo's Italian Restaurant (one of Restaurant eMarketing's clients, couldn't agree more, "We initially tried to run our email newsletter program in house and it was taking too much time to maintain and we didn't even know if what we were doing was effective. I couldn't imagine using anyone other then Restaurant eMarketing... they are amazing!"