The first thing you should know about email marketing? It’s not dead. In fact, far from it:
- Email ad revenue reached $156 million in 2012.
- 95% of online consumers use email.
- 91% of consumers reported checking their email at least once a day.
And email marketing can help you reach a broad audience quickly—and inexpensively:
- For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment.
- 70% of respondents to a recent survey say they always open emails from their favorite companies. Only 18% say they never open commercial emails.
- 93% of consumers also get at least one permission-based email daily.
According to eMarketer, the market research firm, the number of email users in the United States will reach 236.8 million by 2017. Worldwide, that number should reach 2.76 billion over the same time period. That’s a lot of potential customers! So how can you make email marketing work for you?
- Know When to Send. Be sensible when sending or scheduling your emails. Most people check and open marketing emails between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
- Know What to Send. Keep your message short and sweet, avoid fluff, and include your call to action early on. In a world where everyone is inundated with emails, recipients often only read subject lines and/or the first few lines of a message. Make it compelling so they’ll want to read more.
- Know How to Send. Keep your subject lines short. Some experts will say they should have fewer than 10 characters, but that’s a tough order. Just make them interesting. And make sure your messages are mobile-friendly! 43 percent of all emails are already being opened in mobile devices, and that number is growing. Gmail’s open rate is already above 60 percent.
- Know How to Know If It’s Working. In the world of email marketing, you may want to familiarize yourself with terms like bounce rates, open rates, click-to-delivery rates and subscriber retention rates. But according to one survey, 61% of B2B marketers and 48% of B2C marketers worldwide have found that measuring their click-through rate was the most useful way to analyze the performance of their email campaigns. Any decent email management solution or software should provide you with important data about how well your emails are doing. They should be able to tell you your delivery rates, bad email addresses on your list, temporary bounces per mailing, average click through rates, and other key data.
There’s so much to think about when it comes to successful email marketing, but by following the above tips you can get more out of your campaigns.
And, if you’d like to get more out of your hiring dollar, call or contact the team at Smith Hanley. We focus on the niche markets of marketing analytics, direct marketing, market research and capital markets to bring together exceptional candidates with excellent companies.
