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.