I attended a great one-day seminar last week on the topic of email marketing at an event hosted by ExactTarget. They had a variety of speakers in attendance – with split programming tracks in the afternoon for B2B and B2C email marketing. I typically find events like this very invigorating – taking notes like a madman, and eating up any statistics that are thrown out. What I’d like to share with you today are what I feel to be the most noteworthy statements / metrics in regards to email marketing so far this year …
1. Email Marketing Expertise – A recent poll of email marketers asked the question “How well do you know your customers?” Amazingly enough, just over 50% of the respondents said they did not understand their customers. Only 6% of the email marketers polled said they have an “excellent knowledge” of their customers. And the other +40% are somewhere between the two extremes. The KEY to successful email
marketing is RELEVANCE. It is imperative that you have an understanding of the different demographic profiles of your customers to maximize email marketing response.
2. “Treat Them Like GODS” – Your opt-in list members are like raw gold – ripe for mining. They are the ones who have PROACTIVELY signed up for your email list because they are interested in your company and the products / services that you offer. So many email marketers seem to lose sight of this fact. When I opt-in to a list, I expect to see value contained within each email I receive. If I see 2-3 emails
from the same company that is not offering me value, insight, or other pertinant information, it’s time for me to opt-out. As a marketer, if I’m thinking this way, I’d bet your customers are as well.
3. “Landing Pages Are EVERYTHING” – As a marketer, you go through meticulous planning on your future email campaigns. You go through the comp process, test sends, and then launch. But what is often forgotten is exactly where the email sends the user once they click on the link. I observe so many marketing emails where clicks lead directly to a site’s home page. If your home page is updated with content relevent to the email (and, of course, the audience), you’re ok. However, if a user clicks through an email, lands on your home page, and finds NO relevance – they’re going to leave. To put metrics around this, pay special attention to your home page abandonment rates on the day that you send your email.
Honestly, the only way to keep relevance in mind beyond the initial email creation, you MUST create targeted landing pages for your customers to click through to. Landing pages should not only tie back to the email, but also have components on the page that a typical user might not see when visiting your site. I’m specifically referring to a soft cross-sell. An example of this would be for me to receive an email with content relevent to my interests as it relates to company offerings, a click-through leading to a targeted (by demo) landing page with products / services that I have already expressed interest in, while still “teasing” other items on the site that I may not have normally encountered. It sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it? Well, it is. But the reward can be so worth it. Omniture states that behavioural targeting via email leads to “a 20%-25% lift in revenue.”
4. Raw Facts (from email marketing expert Jeanne Jennings):
* There are currently over 12,000,000 active blogs
* There are currently over 2,000,000 RSS feeds available
* Over 70,000,000 unique users on Facebook
* 76.8% of ALL email worldwide is considered “SPAM”
* 18% of ALL emails go directly into a “Junk” folder
* Over 50,000,000 Internet users check emails at least five times every day
* There are currently over 12,000,000 Blackberry devices in use (have you looked at YOUR outbound marketing emails on a Blackberry?)
* A whopping 60% of business leaders prefer email as the main form of business communication (including myself)
* Just over 55% of email marketers polled said that they see the highest ROI through outbound email marketing as compared to any other channel
And now the BIG one – the one that will place many email marketers on edge:
“By 2009, 60% of emails will not be in the traditional “Inbox.”
As mobile devices and data plans have now hit mainstream pricing, the adoption of said devices is running rampant. How will you address the “mini-Inbox” in 2009?
5. “Focus on ‘Preview Pane’ Optimization” – Many of today’s commercial emails follow an established pattern of presenting a statement similar to “Add this email address to your address book,” sometimes in conjunction with a “View as a Web Page” message. Messaging such as this is what appears in the preview pane in programs like Microsoft’s Outlook. Consider using that top space as an area to tease your marketing message, and drive people to actually open and read the email (and if done correctly, take action). Other elements can be relocated on the email so as not to lose them completely. At the very least, try this tactic in one of your upcoming email campaigns and gauge the response against a “traditional” historical email that you’ve previously sent.
6. Online Resources – The following is a list of GREAT sites when it comes to online marketing, and specifically, email marketing tactics. These are sites that many marketers follow on a daily basis:
In closing, I think Ms. Jennings stated it best at the conference – “Create the digital dialogue before your competition does . . .” – because they will!
