Getting Better Results with Email Marketing

Steve Latham, CEO of Spur Digital

E-mail marketing is a popular but often underutilized and/or misused channel for outbound communication. E-mail can be a very effective and inexpensive way to attract prospects, cultivate relationships with customers, gain mindshare among partners and increase brand awareness. Compared to traditional direct media, e-mail offers several advantages.

Higher response rates
E-mail response rates are typically much higher than those of traditional direct marketing. As reported in DoubleClick’s 2002 E-mail Trends Report:

• “Open rates” (% of e-mails opened by recipients) averaged 37%, which was in line with the prior year. Within this category Business Products and Services have the highest open rate of 47.4%. Travel and consumer products had the next highest rate of 42%.
• Overall click-through rates averaged 6.1% in Q3 2002 (up from 4.9% in 2001).Bounce rates average 13% overall.

In general, you should expect the following response rates:

• Non-targeted e-mails typically yield a 0.25% to 3% click-through rate (vs. 0.1%-0.5% for direct mail).
• Targeted e-mails to unknown audiences may yield 3%-10% response rates.
• Personalized e-mails to known audiences may yield response rates ranging from 5-50%.

Ability to track results for each campaign
Through the use of technologies such as cookies, pixels and re-directs, it’s possible to track what happens to e-mail messages after they are sent. For instance, solutions such as those offered by Spur Digital are available to track and report on e-mails that were opened, responded to, forwarded or deleted. This provides marketers with valuable information they can use to:

• Assess results from each campaign
• Measure success of varying email tactics
• Better understand what subjects recipients are interested in
• Qualify and segment prospective customers
• Track new sales to specific marketing campaigns
• Quantify the value of each initiative

Lower cost
Compared to print, TV or radio, e-mail is extremely inexpensive and can be sent either in-house or through a third party for much less than the cost of regular mail. In addition to lower hard-dollar costs, administrative burden of email is falling as well. Through the use of email services, the process of sending, tracking, reporting and updating the e-mail list is becoming easier all the time. The tools and services are available; you just need to know how they fit into your overall strategy.

Risks of Email Marketing
Despite these advantages, there are risks to email marketing as well. The biggest risk is that of annoying prospects, customers, partners and other individuals that are becoming increasingly sensitive to unsolicited email. A few careless actions from an uninformed email marketer can impact thousands of customer relationships and erode your brand equity. For these reasons, you must be knowledgeable about email marketing etiquette. While there are dozens of best practices for email marketing, here are a few “must do’s”:

First, email only those individuals that have opted-in or granted permission to be contacted (preferably, directly to you or at least through a trusted partner).

Second, make it easy for them to unsubscribe. Make sure that once someone chooses to unsubscribe, that request is executed in a timely manner. Under the Can-Spam Act of 2004 unsubscribe requests must be carried out within 10 days of the request. Most people will give you the benefit of the doubt once or twice. But if you fail to remove them from your list after repeated requests, you’re putting the relationship at risk and are breaking the law.

Third, don’t bombard your subscribers with too much mail. Unless they opt-in for specific articles or daily news items, don’t contact them more than once every week or two. If you must do it more frequently, ask them again for permission. You’d rather have them tell you to scale it back rather than unsubscribe from your list.

If you follow these general rules, you reduce the risk of destroying customer relationships and getting into legal trouble. You also lessen the chances of being reported as a spammer.

Throughput Challenges
One of the newest challenges facing email marketers is declining delivery rates due to the increasing use of anti-spam filters. Many companies continue to see declining delivery rates (the % of emails that are received by the intended recipients). Some assume the increase in returned emails is due to bad email addresses. Unfortunately, the real reason may be the increasing use of blacklists, content filters, volume filters and desktop filters that are preventing your messages from getting through.

While these tools serve important functions in preventing unsolicited commercial email (spam), they are wreaking havoc on legitimate marketers’ efforts as well. Unfortunately, the problem is likely to get worse before things get better.

For this reason, email marketers must take action to avoid email blacklists and spam filters. While there is no silver bullet for doing this, there are a few things that can be done, such as:

• Mail only individuals that have granted permission
• Use white-listed email hosts
• Use double opt-in registrations
• Use spam-assessment tools to test the content of your messages (before sending)
• If sending yourself, send in small batches to avoid volume filters
• Make it EASY for recipients to unsubscribe (and make sure you remove them quickly)
• Protect your email list