Email Marketing: What Do Your Customers Really Want?

Like it or hate it – email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers in a personalized way. A research conducted by campaign monitor reveals the key insights that can help increase your ROI. Here's a summary:

Consumers Still Prefer Brands to Communicate via Email

Key finding: There is no doubt, consumers still love email. More than half (52.7%) of those surveyed in the U.S. check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their favorite way to receive communication from brands  (compared to direct mail, mobile apps, social media, push notifications, and mobile wallet).

PREFERENCE OF COMMUNICATIONS FROM RETAIL BRANDS

Marketers are Delivering on Personalization

Key finding: 76% of consumers agree that retail brands are sending relevant, accurate emails which reflect their shopping preferences, location or purchase history. Companies across all industries are delivering on the promise of personalized emails. Overall, consumers overwhelmingly prefer to receive personalized emails across verticals.

AGREEMENT THAT BRANDS ARE SENDING RELEVANT EMAILS ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Along With Personalized Subject Lines, Discounts Drive the Most Opens!

Key finding: Across verticals, the top reasons consumers will open an email from a brand are personalization and discounts. Consumers are just slightly more inclined to open an email offering a discount (72%) than one with a personalized subject line (62%).

CONSUMER PREFERENCE BY EMAIL ATTRIBUTE ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Millennials Lead the Way in Making Purchasing Decisions Based on Email

Key finding: Preferences based on personalization and type of content received from brands did not vary widely among age groups. However, when it comes to taking action based on an email, millennials are far more likely to do so. 58% of millennials “always” or “most of the time” donated to a nonprofit while just 18% of respondents 55+ did the same.

PROPENSITY TO TAKE ACTION BY AGE GROUP ACROSS INDUSTRIES

The bottom line? Marketers must know their audience to run a successful campaign. Consumers prefer when brands personalize their email marketing campaigns, across age groups and verticals, and are seeking more of it. Brands must continue to personalize email campaigns to drive even more success and engagement, particularly with millennials. This trend will continue over time, as email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers!

Link: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/insights-research-report/

E-Mail Newsletters the Way to Go?

More and more web sites will be pushing newsletters into your inboxes in 2009. There is no contest when it comes to the economics of advertising revenues collected via e-newsletters versus CPM for display ads. For example, take the case of Dogster, which extensively uses newsletters:

- Use of Google AdSense can yield a CPM of 28¢

- Use of Glam Media, one of the highest-paying ad networks, would deliver a floor CPM of $2.
But that was still leaving a good amount of revenue on the table, especially considering an ad network takes half the gross.

- In addition to letting Federated Media sell some inventory, Dogster built its own Web sales force, setting CPMs at $8 to $20.

- But even that pales compared to what he charges advertisers per 1,000 views of an ad on his e-mail newsletter: a whopping $20 to $40

A few months ago, Comcast offered $125 million for DailyCandy based on newseltter advertising potential. Last month, Yelp! landed its first national ad campaign for its "Weekly Yelp!" newsletter. At first glance it may seem counter-intuitive that advertisers are willing to spend more money on advertising via low-tech e-mail newsletters. But as this BusinessWeek article points out:

"But remember that signing up for and opening an e-mail newsletter is a much bigger commitment than passively clicking on a link that takes you to a blog post. Publishers can see how many people open an e-mail, how long they read it, and how many friends they forward it to. Advertisers eat up that kind of engagement, because it's different, tangible, and more likely to result in an action such as making a purchase."

See BusinessWeek.com article for more: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090224_035701_page_2.htm

Why "SPAM" is here to stay.

Some of you may define SPAM as the Rolex and Viagra emails that don't actually seem to be selling anything and are chock full of misspellings. I've always looked at it with a much broader scope to include the barrage of emails from retail companies that you get every day at like 3:23am because you once bought something from them and had to include your email address to complete the transaction. I realize that's fairly pessimistic, especially as someone who fully intends to do marketing for a major retailer when I graduate! That said, I've often wondered why J.Crew bothers to send me 4 different emails a day when the most I'll do is click one a month to check out what's new - and then I came across this article, "E-Mail ROI High, Response Rates Low".

While interactive marketers are clearly using metrics beyond ROI, no matter how you cut it, email still makes sense (or cents!) - in fact over $45 for every $1 spent - and generates leads. That was shocking to me until I remembered my last internship, where I (an unpaid intern) was responsible for the creative, which the company then emailed out to current customers - all pretty much for free. Email marketing is cheap, almost free, and therefore relatively effective and here to stay...