Justifying Email Marketing

Impressive stats speak to the power of email marketing.

As evidenced by the following research findings, regardless of industry, email marketing is making an impressive impact on how we conduct business:

• Forrester Research concludes that people who buy products advertised in emails spend 138% more than people who don’t buy through email.
• Email is among the top 5 influencers in business technology decisions (MarketingSherpa and CNET, Business Technology Buyer’s survey, May 2006).
• Email marketing had an ROI of $57.25 for every dollar spent, compared to $7.07 for print catalogs, and $22.52 for non-email internet marketing (Direct Mail Association, 2005).
• In May, 2007, Internet Retailer found that 64.7% of retailers surveyed are conducting more email campaigns than a year ago, while over 94% are building bigger opt-in lists. (They’re doing this because it must be working!)

And, at FulcrumTech, we’re doing our part. Here are a couple of highlights from some of our recent projects:

• Depending upon how well you segment your list, email open rates can reach well over 70%, and we’ve commonly accomplished between 40% and 50% consistently when lists are segmented well.
• Once a quality email list has been developed, promotions to that list can achieve positive ROI within hours or days.

3 Powerful email ideas for you.

There are numerous business building situations where email marketing can be applied. A few samples of how email marketing can be used for your business are as follows:

Relationship marketing

People are more likely to conduct business with you if they trust you. Since we can be inundated with "interactions"—visits to web sites, phone calls, trade show floor introductions—we have a whole lot of interactions, but not necessarily a whole lot of trust. With a carefully planned and executed email campaign, email marketing can be used to provide relevant information, consistently over time to help build trust and nurture relationships.

• For a pharmaceutical client, clinical trial enrollment increased 23% since we implemented an email relationship building campaign. Time is money for pharma, so this is a big deal.

Transactional marketing

Once a prospect has expressed interest, use email to emphasize and support the positive engagement. WebTrends reports that 95% of Web site visitors do not convert in any way after visiting a site (2006). How can you beat this statistic? Email marketing can be used to keep a prospect interested and help move them down the sales funnel. Email marketing can remind prospects to try a product, send you their feedback, and, ultimately, allow you to ask for the sale. The results of which can be profound.

• We have used transactional email very successfully to increase the conversion rate of an online software solution following a 30-day trial period.

Promotional marketing

Email is a very powerful, cost effective tool for communicating offers. Getting the word out on a special offer that your company is promoting can, sometimes, be challenging. With a well designed and executed email campaign, you can send very targeted, personalized and relevant promotions to any segment of your email list. Customers and prospects can receive different messages that speak specifically to their needs. By segmenting lists and communicating specific offers, you can increase the overall success rates.

Making it happen for you.

While there are many great success stories and applications with email marketing, it’s important to remember that email marketing needs to be planned and implemented correctly to deliver the desired results. Successful strategy development and implementation start with understanding your objective and then carefully planning around that. We’ve developed a number of great methodologies for doing just this. Learn more in future NewsLevers, or visit our Web site at FulcrumTech.net.

Want more stats?

EmailStatCenter.com—a great compilation of email statistics to guide you in just about every area of email.

As always, if you have any questions or would like us to help you craft or implement an email strategy to drive results, please call (215-489-9336) or write us today.