Generates better ROI when compared to other channels
Suparna Goswami Bhattacharya
May 21, 2015: In today’s day and age, there are many tools and ways to market your product and company. The advent of social media has obviously made marketing much more dynamic. In this context, it is but natural to think that the era of email marketing is over. Though always on the verge of death at the hands of the latest digital touchpoint, which gets heralded as the future of marketing, email continues to attract a large portion of a company’s marketing budget.
Reason — email continues to have a rate of measurability when compared with other channels. “It is possible to know how and when the user responds and reacts to a specific content of the advertiser. Marketers can easily calculate the exact ROI for every single click. Moreover, through this channel, it is possible to select a specific target of users and send emails only to them, avoiding the waste of sending communications that people are not interested in,” says Binh Thai, director, Lucini&Lucini, a global leader in email marketing and lead generation headquartered in Ireland.
Email happens to be one of the direct ways to digitally communicate with people on one-on-one basis. Hence, email marketing campaign runs high on marketers’ list. Despite death threats, companies are allocating 23% of their total sales budget to email, up from 18% in 2013. In the face of newer digital channels, email has thrived in its role as the unassuming, reliable touch point for marketers to engage with customers.
Daniel Mejía, digital director of Starcom Mediavest Group (Mexico), a human experience company, says, “Email marketing fits well within our comprehensive communication strategies and helps us generate greater engagement in the interested audience. Additionally, it gives us direct knowledge of a user’s habits and behaviour from the leanings we get from reports of campaigns.”
The banking and financial industry happens to be the numero uno user of email marketing, followed by travel and tourism, retail & ecommerce and education.
India-based matrimony site Shaadi.com chose email marketing to increase their user base. “We were looking at building and developing a mailer portfolio, which would help us in acquiring new users on Shaadi.com. Mailers helped us optimise the campaign with precision, particularly the control that enables us to specify the amount of leads to receive daily,” says Baiju Purushotham, Digital Marketing Head at Shaadi.com.
Zerogrey, a firm which produces and manages online stores and the multichannel strategy for luxury and fashion brands, says that email marketing plays an important role in reaching out to a brand’s target audience. “In our case, it is one of our main activities. An important part of the annual turnover of our clients comes from the users who registered to our email newsletters. We have managed several international campaigns using email marketing — one of them was Borsalino,” says a spokesperson from Zerogrey.
However, for any successful email marketing campaign, it is fundamental to choose the right audience before kick starting any email marketing campaign. “It means that the database used for the shoots must be a database of active users, and the publisher must be able to select and targetise the right group (in terms of age, gender, interest and similar) in order to increase the probability to get the ‘action’ of the user (open, click, conversion),” remarks Thai.
Last but not the least, the creative must be attractive and appealing for an email communication to stand out amongst others.
Email marketing tips
- Before designing, writing, and sending campaigns, one should define their audience. Once that is sorted, you get a grasp on the people who will be reading your emails, making it easier to decide what to say to them
- Content is the key. For email marketing, the content needs to be short and precise as well as catchy
- Determine the frequency of emails. Some emails need to be sent multiple times in a day whereas some need to be sent only once a week, depending on the product and marketing strategy
Measuring performance
- Keep a tab on the number of clicks on your sent emails
- Check website traffic log after each email campaign. Check whether there is an increase in traffic after emails have been sent
- Check for how long a person has opened and checked a link