Online Email Marketing

Target Email Marketing for a business will keep you in contact with your customers. By creating target email marketing, your marketing campaign is offering them an invitation to your web site. Today everyone has an email address and most users are fairly knowledgeable in using the system.

Online Email Marketing became quite a critical tool for customer attention and loyalty. By marketing with email 90 percent of customers expect to receive confirmation orders and shipping information by email.

Double Click's Consumer Email Study shows that 90% of consumers go online and receive email several times a day. Forty four percent reported they use email constantly from 33% in 2004. Now the average consumer receives 361 e-mails per week, a 17 percent increase since 2004.

Email Marketing

Introduction:

Although there are issues with spam, email blocking, and phishing, email marketing online remains a powerful marketing online method. An Email Marketing Campaign works best when there is an understanding how to use it. In a poll there was 45% of businesses that said email marketing a "great way" to keep in contact with customers.

Return on Investment (ROI) for email marketing outperforms all other media except telemarketing. While there are some media types that have higher revenue per contact and better response rates, it cost allot more. Looking at the chart below with the lower costs per contact email, response rates are extremely low.

When email marketing online is used correctly the email can balance the lower cost with higher more motivated response rates far better the the other media. This must bye accomplished by maximizing it's effectiveness. Your marketing campaign must have improved content, precise tracking and prestigious targeting.

Email Marketing Tips

Email Campaigns have two missions:

1.) Drive a direct Response and 2.) Develop an Ongoing Relationship

Get your email marketing campaign targeted:

• Create a campaign strategy
• Understand your objectives: Click through, Newsletter signup, purchase etc
• Establish a Analytic Device to measure it's effectiveness

Create and Execute a Target Email Marketing Campaign

Cause for Response: marketing Profs research (2004) show that majority of marketers (53%) feel the offer is the main reason for recipient response.

Format an Design: Recipients of email prefer HTML and Rich Content rather than plain text.

Email Writing Guidelines

Subject Line: The subject is the most important part of the email, make sure to list the mandatory information in the subject. For example you are promoting a Product or Service, put the name and promotion in there, but do not go past 40 - 60 characters. If you do you will lose the reader.

Make the content of the subject line clear and put the most important vital information in the subject line.

Create Act now and a sense of urgency: It is important to tell the recipient to act now. Two thirds of all purchases are impulse buys. Be sure to tell them what you want them to do and be creative in triggering a direct response.

Frequency of Email Message: This varies on a number of factors and it is important to understand consumers do not mind the emails if the content is relevant.

5 Simple Guidelines on Email Frequency

• Mail out email at least once a month: do not be forgotten
• Content will guide you: Understand your readers and get a feel for them
• Work within what you can do: Daily emails is very resource heavy, monthly you can focus on better delivery and content. Quality not Quantity
• Look for the Trends: Look out for declining responses, though some decrease is normal. Manage it carefully and cut back if you see a problem.

Timing Your Email Campaigns

Occasionally timing is everything, and selecting the right delivery time for your email campaign will make a huge difference. A 2005 Study by eROI reported that the day of the week was an important factor of emailing. Within the study, they found that open and click through rates are lowest at mid week. While they become higher on Sundays and Friday.

When the day-of-week statistics were broken down by list size, it was found that large lists (over 100,000 recipients) got better results with execution on Monday through Wednesday, posting a 32% increase in reads and a doubling of click-through rates compared to the other days within the week. As size increases, so do bounce rates, while the read and click-through rates decline.

eROI found that list volume is inversely related to read and click-through rates. As list size increases, so do bounce rates, while read and click-through rates decline. However, one exception was found -- lists of over 200,000 recipients experience spikes in read rates on Saturday because most of the larger lists belong to B2C marketers that target consumers when they are likely to make shopping decisions.

It appears that larger lists should be broken down into smaller segments. Targeting the consumer segments and personalizing the message for the reader. Another tactic is to remove readers who do not read your emails or messages, or you may want to put them into a separate list that receives email less frequently.

The Other list sizes studied were called "micro mailers" these are lists under 5,000 in subscribers, "small mailers" lists of 5,000 to 24,999 and "midsize mailers" which are lists of 25,000 to 99,999.

Micro mailers(under 5,000) received read rates averaging about 35% and click-through rates between 5% and 9%. Those results compare well to the general average of 27% and 4.4%. Weekends were the best time for click-through, averaging 8% to 9% versus 5% to 6% for Tuesday through Thursday.

Small mailers had average read rates and click-through rates of 27.8% and 4.7%, respectively. Friday was the best email execution day, with a 31.2% read rate and 5.3% click-through rate.

Midsize mailers had wide variations in read and click-through behavior, with Monday and Friday being the most productive days (24.4% and 3.85%) and 26.4% and 7.6%), respectively).

Interesting Note:

The data above gives you the open and click rates for US commercial email by days of week, a MarketingProfs 2004 study displayed Tuesdays is the most popular when companies send out emails.

Marketing Profs also found that many marketers send out emails in the morning regardless of the day of the week. Below is a breakdown:

Most likely there is no magical day when to email or universal day in general, but it is important to understand the numbers and research the changes within your campaign.