E-mail Marketing - News and Blog

I wanted to share with you a quick summary of the main points of our presentation on “Using email to get relevant and to get incremental revenue” that we gave at eCommerce Expo last week.

Are we overloading our customers’ in boxes? How many is too many?

Dela Quist sheds light on the question of inbox overload and offers encouragement to email marketers who make an effort to ensure the emails they send are timely and relevant.

Figures released by the US Direct Marketing Association show email marketing is still delivering impressive ROI despite falls over the past two years.

According to the data, marketers will have spent around $500m (£244m) on email marketing to drive $23bn (£11.2bn) in sales by the end of 2007. That equates to $48.56 (£23.60) for every dollar spent.

MailerMailer's latest Email Marketing Metrics Report (pdf) takes a look at open and clickthrough rates, the best days of the week to send emails and how personalisation and subject lines can affect open rates.

It finds that emails with subject lines of 35 characters or less are 28% more likely to be opened, and that open rates have declined overall so far this year.

We’ve recently published our 2007 Email Marketing Buyer’s Guide  and although the sector is as full of challenges as ever, clients and suppliers are still reaping rewards from what is a highly effective channel for acquisition and retention.

Despite the almost total commoditisation of email broadcast services, continuing junk email problems and increasingly discerning consumers, we estimate that the market will be worth £221 million in the UK this year, up 24% from 2006.

One of my team has just spoken at the latest DMA “Effective Email Marketing” conference on the importance of when to send email marketing.   

As part of one of the presentations, John Nugent of Responsys asked a very topical question:

“Should email marketers be paid commission on all the revenue they generate?”

This question has been niggling away at me for a few days, and I can honestly say I don’t think they should. Before you scream, let me explain why.

Retailers in the US and UK are getting better at email marketing, though there is still room for improvement, according to a new survey.

Silverpop's 2007 Retail Email Marketing Study (PDF) looks at opt-in practices, email content and the unsubscribe procedures of 150 major retailers in the UK and North America.

A good online marketer makes their budget stretch a long way. Now I employ an account management team full of them, I’m always gobsmacked by how far they used to make a little money go in their previous positions.

Multi-channel retailers are mounting a challenge to the online dominance of their pure-play rivals despite tending to offer a lower level of site functionality, according to research.

The study, by eDigitalResearch, which uses mystery shoppers to rate UK shopping websites, found Play.com and Amazon.com continued to generate the best overall response from consumers.

However, multi-channel players like Tesco, John Lewis and M&S were seen to have stronger customer service.

Stefan Pollard at ClickZ has put together some tips on best practice in allowing recipients to unsubscribe from emails. This is important, as subscribers will most likely mark your emails as spam if they have any trouble unsubscribing.

Email marketers should therefore make the process of unsubscribing from emails as easy and trustworthy as possible, as if ISPs get too many complaints around your emails, this could seriously damage your sender reputation.