Today’s marketing professionals possess numerous options for reaching potential clients. So many options, in fact, that a huge challenge has become finding the correct balance of the most effective tools. With limited time, where should marketers put their money and energy?
Over the past year there has been a great deal of discussion around the topic of email marketing. In August of 2012, an article on the Harvard Business Review blog network exclaimed over the benefits of email marketing. According to the post’s author, Arthur Middleton Hughes, email excels on many fronts. Perhaps most notably, it’s extremely inexpensive compared to other media. Email’s delivery rate is easily measured, and marketers can know within 24 hours who has opened it, and what links have been clicked on. And according to Middleton Hughes, “Because of electronic links, those who open emails can do their own research: they can explore and see any of the thousands of products that you sell…They can, and they do, read ratings and reviews. They can put products in their shopping carts and buy them.” Emails create impressions, and these impressions lead to sales.
Other marketing professionals assert similarly positive reviews of email as a marketing tool: Email marketing is personal and deepens relationships, which drives profitability; it allows marketers to communicate in real time; it offers numerous tracking possibilities; it creates opportunities for marketers to target a specific audience based on geography, age, income, or other necessary needs.
But how effective exactly are email marketing-only campaigns? An article by Juliette Kopecky published on Hubspot this year looks at exactly that. Kopecky calculates the ROI (return on investment) of three marketing campaign scenarios: direct mail and email, direct mail only, and email only. In her study, the email-only campaign has a 95x better ROI than a direct mail-only campaign, and a 87x better ROI than a direct mail and email combined campaign. That’s a remarkable result!
There are some questions raised by Kopecky’s study. For instance, Kopecky uses a retailer in her experiment. Would other businesses see similar results? Also: there may be costs associated with creating the marketing content that weren’t accounted for in the study. And as with any study, it would be interesting to see if it could be replicated. Is the ROI that Kopecky saw reliable and repeatable?
With the incredibly low expense associated with email marketing, using this tool makes a huge amount of sense. Are you a marketer that successfully uses email? Share your thoughts on our facebook page. Do you think your email marketing could use improvement? Contact AFPI about our email services. We can help you present your customized information in professional html templates, and provide real-time reporting to moniter client response rates.