Search Advisory

Is email marketing dying?  Not according to Simms Jenkins, CEO of BrightWave Marketing.  He showed a slew of statistics at “The Power of eMarketing” conference last week that proved that the rumors of email’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Simms Jenkins & Stacy Williams

These stats included:

• 69% of business executives plan to increase spending on email marketing.  (eMarketer, Nov. 09)
• “For every dollar spent on email marketing in 2009, marketers can expect an estimated $43.62 ROI.”  (DMA, 2009)
• “Nearly a third of survey respondents (32%) said they have stopped doing business with at least one company altogether as a result of its poor email practices.”  (Merkle, 2009)

So how can companies ensure that they’re handling their email marketing correctly and maximizing their ROI?  Simms presented 7 surefire steps: 

1.  Defining Goals, ROI & Program Value

Email marketers tend to be undervalued within many corporations, with 37% of client-side email marketers working in small teams of just one or two people, and 70% saying they don’t have enough staff to prove ROI (EmailStatCenter.com).  Proving ROI is critical, but toward what goal?

According to a ClickZ study (June 2010), 44% measure their email program using “customer engagement” as a yardstick.  Twenty-three percent said that factors that contribute to revenue (like engagement) matter.  Revenue – the bottom line – was the goal for 21% of those surveyed.

2.  Subscriber Acquisition

What’s the value of a single, opt-in email address?  Stan Rapp has estimated $118, and Epsilon has set this at $23.  Either way, interested subscribers are valuable.  Give prospects and customers every opportunity to subscribe.  Online, don’t bury the sign-up link or box – make it easy to subscribe.

Offline, allow people to sign up via sales collateral, point-of-sale materials, through a call center rep, or even in-flight (Southwest Airlines promotes their emails on the napkins handed out by flight attendants.)

One thing you should never do, according to Simms, is rent an email list.  He said you’re better off taking that money and spending it on search engine marketing instead.  (I promise, I did not spur him to say that, but was glad to hear it!)

3.  Email Creative & Messaging

There are plenty of challenges with email marketing, particularly when it comes to creative.  There’s inbox congestion, a lack of clear value and relevancy, mobile rendering problems, and more.

Only 33% of surveyed consumers have images turned on by default (MarketingSherpa).  So be sure there’s plenty of text in your emails so the other 67% of recipients will know what your message is about, even if they can’t see the images.

Enable viral behavior so recipients will pass your message along.  Break out of the (in)box by doing something unexpected, like a horizontally-scrolling message.  You’ve got less than 10 seconds to grab the recipient’s attention, so make them count.

4.  Frequency, Segmentation & Targeting

The inbox is evolving.  Some marketers are giving customers more control over the frequency and types of messages they receive.  Zappos recently told its email subscribers that, leading up to the holidays, they’re planning to send emails Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for the next five weeks.  They gave people the option to see all, some, or none of these messages.

More companies are segmenting their lists so as to send targeted messages to each group.  Dynamic content can do things like insert the photo and contact information of your sales rep into the message that you receive. 

In using redesigned creative for remarketing efforts, BrightWave has found that the new creative can lift response rates between 100-350%!  So as with all digital marketing efforts, testing creative can make a huge difference.

5.  Leveraging Social Media

There are a number of ways to integrate email marketing with social media, including:

• Tweeting your email newsletter
• Broadcasting blog entries to your email list
• Adding sign-up forms on social media pages like Facebook
• Including “follow us” links in email messages
• Linking to email messages on social media pages
• Including “share” options in email messages
• Enabling recipients to share email content with their social networks
• Using email to launch a referral/viral marketing campaign in social media
• Integrating user-generated content/reviews into email campaigns (eMarketer, 2010)

Best practices for integrating email and social include:

• Don’t just ask people to follow, like or join – present a benefit and explain what’s in it for them.
• Invite people to join within the message body, not just through buttons or the footer.
• Avoid being the “cut & paste” marketer – the voice, tone & messaging matter and should be unique for each platform.
• Test and test again.
• Don’t forget to use social media to acquire for email too!

6.  Measuring Your Program Beyond Opens & Clicks

Jim Sterne, Founder of the Web Analytics Association, said “Do not use stats as a drunkard uses a lamp post – for support rather than illumination…the only three business metrics that count are increased revenue, lower expenses and increased customer satisfaction.”

Create an email scorecard and include the highlights for the month, benchmarking over time, the impact on other channels, and comparisons to industry benchmarks.  This will help prove the ROI.

7.  Low-Hanging Fruit

There are some easy things email marketers should consider, like sending a special message to subscribers who haven’t opened your emails lately.  Ask them to click a link to “tell us you still like us” or they’ll be unsubscribed.  You can also tell subscribers how they can help you personalize your messages to them.

And…proofread and test so you don’t send out something sloppy or with misinformation.

Brightwave Marketing also runs the EmailStatCenter website, where a wealth of industry stats are housed.  Follow Brightwave on Twitter.  Follow Simms Jenkins on  LinkedIn or Twitter.

This is the seventh in a series of ten posts covering The Power of eMarketing conference put on by the eMarketing Association.  Additional sessions will be covered through tomorrow.  To view all posts published to date, click on the “ema1010” tag at left or below.