Don’t Forget Email Marketing: Stats, ROI… It “Stacks Up”

Don’t let all the buzz surrounding social media distract you from the power of email marketing. Sure feeds are great and social media participation is a powerful way to demonstrate the value your business offers. But email reading is still the thing most people do most online…

It may be old-fashioned but it’s low cost and it works: email marketing should be an important part of your online marketing mix.

Okay, “old-fashioned” may be overstating things — is online marketing old enough for any tactic to be old-fashioned? But reading as much on online marketing as I do, it’s easy to forget about email, when all the buzz is about blogging and social media.

Bottom line: not everybody online is tweeting, blogging or social networking and RSS feeds, spam free though they may be, aren’t yet a well-subscribed channel. Everyone online uses email from my 73 year old stepfather to my 8 year old second cousin.

Some Email Marketings Stats That Matter:

Why is email marketing front of my mind? Well my RSS feeds [hat tip to irony here] and inbox have been full of good numbers around email marketing in the last day or two.

• According to eMarketer retailers think email is recession ready:
  • Smith Harmon’s “Retail E-Mail Year-End Trends for 2008″ (January 6, 2009) report shows 90% of the top 100 retailers (the ones with the resources to know and implement best practice) sent more email in the Holidays, 15% doubled or more email frequency in December over other months… They didn’t do it for fun they did it because it pays.
  • The U.S. Direct Marketing Association released a study in October showing commercial email returning $43.52 per dollar spent versus $11.74 for direct marketing in general.
• And a little more from eMarketer on“The Powerful Potential of Permission-based E-mail”:
  • An Epsilon and ROI Research October study found 40% of consumers were more likely to purchase more from companies that emailed them after a purchase.
  • And the same report found 49-72% of people willing to “read email from companies they know after days or weeks” or save email for later reference when purchasing.

Be Careful Though: There Are Risks With E-mail

There is a risk in the increasing how frequently you email customers, as the chart shows.

Seven in ten people don’t want more email from your company. And they might just unsubscribe if you flood their inbox with stuff they don’t value.

That’s why I urge clients to make sure they have something worthwhile to offer in any email they send. So it’s important to:

• plan to email people regularly but not at a frequency that leaves you struggling to find something of value to recipients to communicate.
• demonstrate that value early in the email so it is hard to miss in email client preview windows or on a blackberry or phone.

Remember: people will save your email to read later but it needs to pass the initial scan for “what’s in it for me” test first.

If you are finding it hard to prioritise marketing strategies in current hard times, keep the email going out with good strong offers.

And, speaking of current economic woes, how many times have I read that existing customers are your best/first option for improving sales in “get your business through the recession” articles lately. How do you contact them? Well, email isn’t a bad bet…

Bonus link:

Are you a small business owner wondered whether all this corporate email data applies to your business?  “10 Email Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners”, just published by MarketingProfs, offers a useful guide to how email marketing can help your business.

Two Email Trails: Careful Where You Send ‘em

I received two email promotions yesterday. Both were good enough to win a click. But one had no chance of converting into a sale. The sender didn’t do enough to help me spend my money. After I clicked I saw no prominent signage to the trail I was interested in following.

I’m time poor. I get a lot of email. And I’m online promotion shy.

I’m pretty normal then for thirty-something professionals with a little cash* to spend who’re online daily for work/communication/play purposes. For me the email/RSS thing is maybe more acute — you try staying on top of developments in ever-evolving world of Internet marketing…

Anyway.

An Email Promotion Good Enough to Win My Click

Both emails where compelling enough for me to lift a weary finger and click through to the site:

• Amazon — targeted as ever — was offering discounts on social media marketing books because (see above re. “ever-evolving world of internet marketing”) I’ve bought the odd online business book now and again.
• Fishpond, New Zealand’s biggest bookstore (think: Amazon circa 1998), was offering $10 credit if I bought any of the items in a Wishlist I haven’t looked at for months. Not a bad idea. I’ve expressed interest in these books maybe a little shove is all I need.

Not sure I would have clicked on either email if I hadn’t been a. cursed to pursue the pot at the end of the internet marketing knowledge rainbow and b. interested in how Fispond is chasing sales because I am cursed… “You get the picture.” But that’s beside the point.

Turning Click into Conversion With A Well Marked Trail

The point? The point is that Amazon delivered on my expectations but Fishpond didn’t:

• Amazon offered a landing page bulging with social media books. (Out of date from the moment the writer and editor agreed they were ready to be published but that, too, is beside the point.) Some I already own, so the targeting was there but the personalisation was a little lacking. If one of the titles had related to a particular challenge I, or one of my clients, was facing I might have even tried to remember my Amazon password.
• Fishpond offered their homepage as the landing page. They were asking me to sign in, remind myself what I had in my wishlist, etc. Well. Immediate access to my Wishlist is probably too much to ask — some serious technical challenges. The homepage has a lot of popular books. The “Sign In” link is prominent on the homepage.  Not bad. But not good enough. I needed something more closely related to the reason I clicked.

Fishpond Lost Me When I Lost the Trail of My Wishlist

The Fishpond email had me thinking “Wishlist”. The trail I was following was marked “Wishlist”. The homepage with its “Wishlist” text link amounted to a trail with insufficient signage. In the few seconds I — like any Web user — allowed the page to hold my attention there wasn’t enough of a trail to follow.

What could Fishpond have done?

Ideally, they would have created a landing page for the promotion mentioning the offer I had responded to and prompting me to signin to my wishlist. They’re not Amazon; their resources are limited. The ideal isn’t always possible in an SME/SMB like Fishpond. I know. I’ve been there.

Sending me to their wishlist page would have helped.  But some changes to that page would have meant the trail I was following was prominent.

1. Heading, “My Wishlist Contains”, becomes “Your Wishlist: Keep Track of Stuff You Want”
2. Copy, “No products are in your Wishlist” becomes “Login or register to view or store stuff you’d like for later” with relevant fields. Indeed, two succinct options would be good. (Note: I am assuming this is the permanent page a landing page would vary in not needing to cater to new visitors by offering calls to action related to registering.)
3. Additional content to be added if at all possible: (not quite a specific landing page) mention of the 24 hour promotion to be added to the page if you can be sure that it will be removed as soon as the promotion is history.
4. Other content, (”Want to know what other shoppers wishing are for? View the top 10 most desired wish list items here.”) would be replaced with the actual list to create another way of grabbing my attention. This new “trail” is a detour but a prompt to “Add to Your Wishlist” could get people back on track.

Bottomline:
If you are running an email promotion send people to a page on your site that references that promotion or, at least, is directly related to it. A promotion-specific landing page can be tough to arrange. But you need to offer signposts on the trail that leads to your goal action. Don’t make people work any harder than is absolutely necessary to get to the relevant parts of your site.

*“A little cash” and seeming smaller all the time with current interest rates and what the commentators call “economic uncertantity”. All the more reason to make it as easy as you can for me and all the other mortgage slaves out there to spend money at your site.