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What are the benefits of email marketing?

1. Email Is Popular

Email is consistently rated as the most popular and most used application on the internet. Indeed, some people only use email and do not browse the internet at all!

Email is the preferred primary means of business communication (ahead of telephone and postal mail).

42% of business users check their business email while on holiday.
53% of business users check their email six or more times during the working day.
34% of internet users check their email continuously throughout the day.
96% of internet users' main reason for being online is email.

There are over 450 million email boxes worldwide, with the number rapidly increasing.

Email marketing will become a $9.4 billion business by 2006.
(Source: Forrester Research, and Jupiter Communications)

2. Save Time and Money

No printing, no postage, no mail house charges.

Traditional direct mail costs between £1 and £3 per recipient and can take over a month to complete. With email, the cost can be reduced to pennies per recipient and completed in hours.

It takes far less time to create and send an email compared to a traditional direct mail campaign.

Overall, the return on investment of opt-in email is 40 times greater than direct mail.

3. Increased Sales

It's not unusual for email campaigns to get 5%-15% response rates.

The response rate of opt-in email is 50 times greater than banner ads and 5 times greater than direct mail.

4. Instant Results

Minutes after sending out your email campaign you can start seeing responses and orders. And you can time your campaigns to arrive on the best day of the week or month for maximum response.

Instead of waiting weeks for responses and test results, you'll have them in hours.

80% of responses to an email campaign will occur within 3 days (traditional direct mail takes weeks).

5. Measurable Results

Email campaigns are fully trackable, with up to the minute statistics. You can easily test which message generates the best response and alter your campaign accordingly.

6. Quick To Create

You could knock out an email in an hour or two as opposed to weeks in the "offline" world.

In addition, you can even make money from your newsletter itself by selling ad space or by using a paid subscription model. See "Making Money From Your Newsletter" later.

7. Personalisation and Targeting

Email allows your message to be personalised. Instead of "Dear Customer" you can address the recipient as "Dear Rachel" and send offers targeted to their preferences.

 

Of course the subject line, overall attractiveness, and offers are important according to this survey, but significantly less important than "know and trust the sender" (56%) and "previously opened and thought valuable" (51%). I learn two lessons from this.

1. E-Mail as Relationship Building

First, effective e-mail marketing is about building relationships of trust with the recipients. These are not "mass" mailings, but e-mails to individuals whom we respect and with whom we are building a relationship. E-mails sent to exploit, deceive, or take advantage of recipients will immediately decrease opening of further e-mails.

You have one good chance to build this relationship. When someone signs up for your newsletter or regular e-mail, he will probably remember your company name as it appears in the "From" field and open it to see what you have. If he likes it, he may open it in the future. If he doesn't he may or may not unsubscribe, but he certainly won't open it henceforth with the same positive attitude.

If he does like what he sees, he'll be likely to open it in the future, since 32% of respondents said "I only opened the e-mails I normally read." You may become one of the select few whose e-mails get through not only spam filters, but also the recipient's "trust filter."

Three action steps seem evident:

A. Help the recipient to get to know you. You need to e-mail regularly enough that the recipient gets acquainted with your e-mails. Too infrequent and she won't remember you. Too often and your e-mail will remain unopened. For many companies that frequency sweet spot is one to two times per month, though you'll need to determine this by testing open rates and revenue generated.

B. Help the recipient to trust you. In Walt Disney's 1977 movie "The Rescuers," Madame Medusa says famously about the child she has captured, "I force them to like me!" You can't force recipients to trust you, but you can be trustworthy. You can temper your claims so they are believable.

C. Offer a consistent, personable "voice." The third-party corporate voice doesn't build a relationship except with a brand. But a consistent corporate spokesperson is able to build a relationship with readers, especially if he or she writes in a personable way.

2. E-Mail as a Value Proposition

Second, e-mail recipients must view your e-mail as valuable or they won't read it in the future.

I subscribe to and scan e-mails from Staples, Tiger Direct, and CompUSA. Why? Because they seem to have good offers. Even if I don't need what they offer right now, they may have what I need next time. When I'm convinced that they no longer offer what I might need at good prices, I'll stop reading them.

Whats new in marketing have a great article covering "The Top 10 E-marketing strategy issues of today and tomorrow?"

Click here to see the article now.