What’s Going Wrong with Email Marketing?
Last Updated on Friday, 10 July 2009 02:33 Written by Kevin Saturday, 9 May 2009 09:47
Remember Debbie Mayo-Smith? She was super popular here a few years back, telling businesses the power of email marketing. It was all simple and cheap. Anyone could do it. And she was right…
How times have changed. Now there’s multiple delivery issues, poor open rates, filtering and strict anti-spam legislation to contend with. Even website banner advertising is destined to lowly 0.1% response rates, meaning rapidly reducing returns and marketing effectiveness.
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The good and the bad news
Although only marginally effective for lead generation, email is superb at customer retention duties – It just takes a whole lot more planning and care than it did when Debbie started out. Of course you still need a good database of recipients, which again takes time and money to build.
Then there’s the escalating problem of poor delivery and open rates rates. That is, of the emails that are sent, how many are either trashed by filters, or just plain ignored because of bad subject, offer or content.
The average email open rates email providers data is a miserly 20-40% and a much lower 13% average by e-Marketer who indicate that this open rate is steadily falling every year! Regardless, it’s all a fraction of what’s delivered by the Postie to your letterbox. We also need to factor in the costs.
Certainly if you’re send out 10,000 emails at a cost of around 5-10c each (for a professional html, fully tracked variety) vs 40c – 70c for direct mail, (excluding related design time/costs), then email on the surface makes financial sense if you’re focusing on cost reduction alone, not response rates, sales or ROI.
Good Subject and Copy Helps
Hiring an expert copywriter who is also familiar with all the internet spam issues can help, plus sending out all emails in text-only mode, certainly improves things delivery-wise, although is less attractive and enticing to readers.
Open rates can also be helped by changing your software, service provider or using authenticated domains. But any hard-fought technical fix today, could break tomorrow, requiring ongoing investment.
Experts say an open rate of 80-90% is possible, but these solutions don’t come cheap and take an immense amount of planning. But as the cost & complexity climbs Marketers may have to revert back to radio, print ads or direct mail…
There’s simply no ‘Quick Fixes’ to all this within the internet community, as confirmed by a Forrester Research report.
Making eMail work better – Integration with other media
Unfortunately those within the internet community are only considering solutions from within – Unable to see the forest, for the trees. Sometimes, the solution is right in front of us, if we look ‘outside the box’…
Today no media can work well in isolation. Not print, TV, Radio or online options. As case studies have shown, email can be dramatically enhanced by other media, especially direct mail to a targeted, local audience. What’s more, this simple cross-media strategy is self-funding, giving a real return on investment.
P.S. Looking at the average 10% open rates for eCommerce storefronts, it’s easy to see why old fashioned direct mail provided such a huge boost in sales for online shop Bare Necessities featured earlier.
What is email really good at?
Email, marketers, like SEO and website experts all proclaim that THEIR product or service is the ultimate. It does everything perfectly and no other media choice should be considered.
The reality is that we live in a multi-media world. It’s always a question of getting the best, most efficient match for the task in hand. Allow the variou8s tools to complement each other, not compete. One interesting graphic provided by cross-media provider Eloqua recently was the new sales generation funnel. Here it shows that email is seldom the best tool for lead generation. Websites, TV, Direct Mail and Print Advertising is. eMail follows much later and then used primarily for customer retention.