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By Tom Groenfeldt
E-mail may be losing ground to social media, but it is still an important tool for business, according to MailerMailer, which offers benchmarking for companies that rely on e-mail for promotion.
"One of the benefits of e-mail marketing is the ability to get detailed tracking and reporting on your efforts,” said the company in a July report. “We value this quantitative feedback and know that with it, marketers are able to constantly tweak and improve their e-mail efforts."
But the study warns against getting too caught up in metrics: "A campaign that generates revenue in excess of its cost is successful, no matter what the open and click rates are."
One reason for the continued use of e-mail is the high return on investment. The report cites the Direct Marketing Association, which says that e-mail continues to deliver the highest ROI of any marketing channel, at $43.62 for each dollar spent in 2009. That figure is more than twice the ROI from Internet search advertising, which came in second at $21.85 per dollar spent.
Marketers continue to expand their investments in both e-mail and social media. A MarketingSherpa survey found that e-mail is one of only two tactics in which more marketers increased budgets than decreased budgets in 2009. The other was social media.
Video in e-mail is also proving popular and can increase click rates by two to three times. And it doesn't have to be fancy or consume a lot of bandwidth. A screenshot of a video with a link proves to be effective. Mobile access to e-mail, at 200 million in 2009, is projected to increase to 1 billion by 2013, says the MailerMailer report, citing the Radicati Group.
What's at risk? Cluttered inboxes, to start with. “Sending relevant, targeted messages that incorporate e-mail standards and best practices to subscribers that have explicitly opted-in to receive them is the best way to be a successful e-mail marketer in 2010 and beyond,” says the study.
That has always been true, but since the cost of sending an e-mail is near zero, the temptation always exists to blast them out to anyone whose address you have. And if you aren't doing it, your competitor may be, taking customers and helping to make e-mail marketing less successful.
Other findings from the report include:
- The overall open rate has dropped 10 percent this year to 11.2 percent.
- You can expect 30 percent of your opens to occur within two hours and after 23 hours you'll have 75 percent of your total opens.
- The best day to send an e-mail is Sunday.
- Short subject lines, with 35 characters are less, outperformed longer subjects.
- Marketers sending e-mail less than once a month generated bounces more than 200 times of those who sent monthly.
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