Catch subscribers’ attention like Mr Miyagi caught flies with chop sticks!
Just recently I heard about a company that quit their email marketing for a very strange reason: business was doing well, and they’d only need email marketing if things would turn ugly for them. How strange is that?
There are several reasons email is fantastic as a marketing channel compared to other (online) marketing channels in terms of building a relationship with prospects, clients and subscribers. Read more
In the old days (let’s say 6 years ago) email marketing was sort of simple. You had one platform called desktops (sometimes portable desktops called notebooks) where people used email clients: either offline clients like Outlook and such, or webmail clients like Hotmail and Gmail.
This would mean that you’d optimize email campaigns for a handful of clients, and mostly manually tested them too: no biggie!
However, along came a certain company that reinvented the smartphone after a few tries by Nokia, Motorola and other brands to do just that. The iPhone (2007) and later the iPad (2010) were introduced by Apple, much to the delight of consumers. Because of their commercial success, all the other companies rallied and started making smartphones and tablets too, which meant even more differentiation on the market.
Meanwhile, what happened to the ‘ol desktop/notebook platform? Screens got bigger, up to 24″ or even 30″ sometimes, but also smaller: enter the widescreen netbooks with weird resolutions like 1366 x 768 pixels. Read more
How would you go about introducing a new product in the Photoshop family if you were Adobe’s marketing department sending out a promotional email? Probably with lots of lavishly designed graphics, special offers or discounts for existing customers, key feature highlights, stuff like that, right?
Adobe thinks differently about that. They’re not really into email conversion optimization it seems. Yesterday I received their email promoting the recently launched Photoshop for iPad and it was lacking in many departments.
Here’s the full email (pink overlay is my work, I’ll get to that in a bit):
Subject line was: Now you can create Photoshop magic on your iPad. Read more
Informz, an email service provider for associations and non-profits, has published their annual association email marketing benchmark report. One of the key findings is that relevancy, not timing, is key (for this industry). The report contains data from 700 assocations using their platform, and those are located in the US, Canda, UK, New Zealand and Australia. Email volume sent over 2011 amounts to about 600 million.
Key findings of the report as noted in the press release: Read more
Imagine every email you send as an email marketer costing 5 bucks. Sending out to the nice round number of 100,000 people would cost half a million. All of a sudden, you would make every single e-mail and every single address count. Why else would you spend that kind of cash to send out your next email newsletter?
Of course current email costs are low compared to many other marketing channels, and return on investment is comparatively high. But instead of thinking that you send as much as you can (which I do support, up to a point), think about making every single email count like it would be the last one you send out at your current job, or one costing 5 bucks like the previous example.
Because one should not forget that to get an interesting amount of revenue from email, there should be a considerable investment at first. This doesn’t mean having the biggest list out there. Having a 100,000 people on your list sounds nice, but what if only a 100 people do something in response? In that case the 99,900 other contacts on that list are quite useless…
Finding out how to provide value to all your list members is crucial: it will take you some time and investment of resources, but will pay back. A lot actually: currently email is the ROI champ with a 43 to 1 ratio (read here). For every dollar invested you get 43 back. Unbeatable methinks: other channels are slipping or still have to prove themselves (like social media).
When you make an email more valuable (e.g. relevant content, timely fashion, etc) to the subscriber they will respond better to it, and more shall respond!
To recap: next email campaign will cost you $500,000. Spend it wisely.
edit 13:42 CET:
Jordie van Rijn has reacted to this post in lightning fashion: his responding blog post can be found here: http://www.emailmonday.com/the-value-of-email-marketing-messages
