QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER FOR EMAIL MARKETING

I am sometimes surprised when clients considering email marketing don’t ask themselves several basic questions:

1) How many emails should I send to get the number of responses I need?
2) Is the contact/job title I want a realistic one, ie. are these likely to be collected?
3) Are the number of contacts I ideally want available?

In many cases the quantities do not add up to required campaign numbers. With average open rates for acquisition campaigns currently running at 15% and click to open rates at 6%* it is easy to work out the potential outcome of any given campaign.

The second common oversight is that some clients do not take into account the delivery of the emails and the process involved.

Companies will sometimes try and launch a campaign using their PC and then wonder why a high proportion of emails bounce. A standard PC often uses Outlook or other type of SMTP (Single Message Transfer Protocol) which is fine when sending a few emails but is most definitely not designed for bulk emails. The consequence can be a much higher than average bounce rate.

The use of a professional broadcast system not only enables clients to deliver a campaign, it also tracks it and provides full reports with open rates, click throughs (ie. which links were of interest) and bounces. This all helps in building a definitive picture of what has and hasn’t worked, so that next time you can use the good bits and discard those that are not so good for ever more successful campaigns.



*National Email Benchmarking Report Q2 2008