Posted on Tuesday 19th of September 2006 at 09:25 in The Internet

Is Effective Email Marketing Dead?

After having been heavily involved in a recent email marketing campaign, it seems that this once golden methodology is nearing the end of it's life. This campaign in particular involved sending a newsletter to several thousand expecting users (who specifically signed up to receive this email). However, the percentage of users who actually opened the email was around 20%, sometimes dropping into single digits. If your campaign that you're spending a few thousand pounds/dollars on is only reaching a maximum of 1/5 of your customers - is it still really worth it?

With the word "spam" floating around and criminally high levels of the stuff bouncing in and out of mailboxes all around the world, we become used to deleting mail that we don't instantly recognise - that is provided it makes it past the machine-gun wielding spam-filter. Therefore numerous "bargains" are deleted without even being opened - and this seems to be the common trend for modern email-marketing.

Unlike direct-mail campaigns that result in fully designed material physically coming through your front door - which you actually HAVE to see and put in your hand. Albeit if the material is put into the bin directly afterwards, you HAVE to see it and more often than not, at least have a brief look through. This equates to a much higher read-rate than the 15-20% achieved by succesful email-marketing campaigns.

Sadly enough, there is no viable alternative for email-marketing. RSS marketing could be effective but invasive, while true direct mailing is an expensive process. Email marketing is (potentially) a cheap means of broadcasting *something* to a wide number of people, but to make it worthwhile you would need a significant number of propsective clients: allowing it to remain financially logical with a 10% open-rate.

Looking at the numbers, if your email advertising a new service is only read by 15% of the 10,000 users it was sent to, that means only 1,500 actually opened your email. How many of those will continue to purchase your new product/service? The smart money will be on "not many".

Therefore, how can you improve your email marketing - seeing as there is no real alternative currently?

My Five Key Points
These are my five key points to more succesful marketing:
1. Broadcast on Tuesday/Wednesday - around 2-3pm gets the best response
2. Personalised emails - Hello John, we have a new product...
3. Avoid spam filters - don't use words like FREE or Viagra, be sensible yet descriptive
4. Good subject lines - users take around half a second to work out whether to read or delete new mail - use it wisely!
5. Test your emails - run tests monitoring click-throughs from at least 3 different layouts and use the best

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