MarketingSherpa recently published the 2012 edition of its Email Marketing Benchmark Report and once again, it’s full of really interesting insights.
Yes, it’s a report that focuses mainly on the US market (only 16% of the 2,735 respondents are based in Europe) but I still think we can learn a thing or two from the findings of this report. I’ve chosen these five findings to share with you:
1. Relevance and timing issues
Only 28% of marketers report their messages contained relevant content, are sent on time to targeted subscribers, and had a clear conversion goal.
What does this mean? To stand out in today’s overloaded inboxes, you need to consistently provide value to your subscribers. You can’t just continue to send everything to everybody. Instead, make sure that each and every message is well targeted and relevant to the person that receives it. Otherwise, your messages will get deleted, even before they were opened.
2. Marketers confident in email ROI
More than a quarter of senior marketer executives felt email is producing ROI, and almost half believe it will eventually produce returns.
What does this mean? It’s obviously crucial to get management buy-in if you want to increase your email marketing budget/resources. The best way to get their buy-in is by showing them the impact of email on the marketing-sales funnel. If you can’t measure how much money your email programme is contributing, focus on how many (sales-ready) leads you are generating, rather than reporting only on the opens and clicks of your campaigns.
3. Wise list growth tactics
37% of marketers say their organisations shared premium or educational content in exchange for an email address. Sweepstakes (used by only 10% of marketers) and gift cards (used by 6%) are not very popular when it comes to growing your list.
What does this mean? Incentives are often used by marketers to persuade web visitor to give them their email address.
The trick is to find the right incentive. You don’t want to get just any email address; you want to get email addresses from people that are likely to buy your products or services. You’d probably get a ton of email addresses if the incentive is something that attracts to the general population (like the ubiquitous iPad giveaway), but will they also be interested in your products?
Experience has taught me that email addresses collected using sweepstakes, giveaways and contests typically don’t perform very well in terms of open and click-through rates.
4. Email budgets on the rise
67% of marketers plan to increase their email budget in 2012, with 20% planning to increase it more than 30%.
What does this mean? Email marketing is still a crucial component of your online marketing strategy and, if executed well, it will drive a lot of business and revenue at a low cost. But marketers need to invest in strategy, expertise, integration of systems and resources.
5. Value of automated, triggered emails
90% of marketers found that sending emails automatically to a subscriber based on triggers like planned dates, events or behaviours are the most effective tactic to improve relevant communications.
What does this mean? The great thing about automated email messages based on triggers is that you typically set these messages up, optimise them and then sit back and watch the results come in while you focus on getting another automated message set up.
Quick wins in email marketing
If you don’t have a lot of resources to dedicate to email marketing, focus your efforts on automating email campaigns where possible. The top four automated messages include welcome emails, thank you emails, transactional emails and post-purchase emails.
No comments:
Post a Comment