Growing your bottom line through effective email marketing

Brand Republic 25-Jan-07, 08:00

If this year you want to see visible ROI for your marketing spend, add this to your goals: make your email marketing more effective, writes Simone Barratt, managing director of e-Dialog.

Surprisingly, many marketers are still not paying enough attention to their email marketing. In comparison to other marketing and advertising channels email is cheap. But even in this "second wave" of digital marketing where marketers are increasingly shifting the balance of their budget from TV to online, emails' low-cost allocation in the budget means it often doesn't get the attention it deserves.

Email may not be as sexy as TV or some of the other online media, but if you're smart you can use it to make a real impact on your bottom line. According to the DMA's Power of Direct economic-impact study released in October 2006*, email returned £32 for every pound spent on it in 2005.

So it's time to wake up and understand what email can do for you. Here are four things you can do with email to improve your marketing ROI.

Use the lessons learned from email to get the most out of your customer-centric, multi-channel marketing strategy
Marketers are being turned on to and using an ever growing number of online options -- from RSS, mobile, blogs and podcasts to Wikis. If you're already using email you need to start feeding the information you've collected about your customers from your campaigns and applying the same data, skills and processes that have worked for email to your other online marketing. By observing how your customers behave and capturing data on what they do, you can learn what works and doesn't and use this to improve your marketing campaigns. After all, they're the same customer relationships you've had in place all along. You can't neglect them as you move into new channels.

Manage and maintain your email reputation
Today 70% of retailers send email -- an increase of 27% from last year. But if you don't want your messages to find themselves binned in the spam folder, you need to consider how you manage and maintain your email reputation. A bad one can cost dearly and is hard to leave behind. It can also have a profound effect on your brand. Relevance is key here. Make sure you maintain a highly deliverable list, send well targeted, relevant mailings and take all necessary measures to protect the privacy of your recipients.

Use your offline communications to encourage email sign up
Amazingly many companies still only have email addresses for less than 20% of their customers. Acquiring new customers is expensive, so expand the number of channels through which your customers can do business with you. Build a list of people who do business with you, like you, and want to learn about other offers relevant to them by using every offline touch point as an opportunity to encourage customers to sign up to your email programme.

Use behavioural targeting techniques
Most companies will delete the shopping cart if the customer doesn't complete the transaction. But by tracking your customers and feeding observations on their behaviour into your communications you can keep hold of them and grow their business. This can range from something as simple as sending an email message to the customer to encourage them to complete the order with a discount or some other incentive, to more savvy techniques which follow up individual visitor searches up with incentivised email messages related to the object of the search.

So what are you waiting for? Tune in and turn on to the power of email.

* Note: US figures