The interesting facts below confirms our belief that subscribers must be respected and the following is to apply:

1. Ensure the information you send to your subscribers is relevant to them; and they receive what they subscribed to. If that is a monthly newsletter then it is imperative that a monthly newsletter is delivered to that subscriber.
2. Avoid sending all your business communication to all subscribers – if the subscription is for a monthly message (newsletter) sending weekly communication will more than like result in a high unsubscribe rate.

More than half of consumer email users use at least two email addresses, apparently to protect themselves from spam and cybercrime, according to an October 2007 survey by email reputation service Habeas and market research firm Ipsos that found what it called a high “email insecurity factor” among regular email users.

Among the findings:

73%: Survey participants who use email daily
62%: Concerned about becoming victims of fraud or cybercrime
60%: Say spam is becoming worse
83%: Say their email client’s user interface has a spam button
23%: Say their email service has fraud detection
64%: Say permission/personal email regularly get routed to the spam folder or blocked

“Despite the popularity, ubiquity, cost-effectiveness and targeted nature of email, online relationships and the interactions that enable them are very fragile,” said Habeas CEO Des Cahill. “If individuals, marketers, businesses and Web 2.0 communities cannot place their trust in email, the Internet’s premier ‘killer app’ will not reach its full potential as these groups could refrain from using it for higher value interactions.”

Source

Delivering regular emails to your mailing lists with relevant information provides a higher open rate. With your emails professionally presented in a branded template subtle advertising of your business is the net result each time you deliver your email campaign. However ’subtle’ this advertising may be the Return on Investment (ROI) for creating and delivering the regular emails is positive.

Add a promotion of a product or service in your regular email campaigns (newsletters, tips etc) and the net results can be astounding – however due to the compulsion to compare the success of email marketing with your other advertising initiatives e.g. print media (magazines, newspapers etc) the evidence of success with email marketing is not easily identified . We can be forgiven for assessing the statistics produced for an email campaign without including the projected sales and cost of the campaign.

The most effective way to assess the success of your email marketing however is by looking at the whole picture by comparing the statistics per email campaign per month and the projected sales minus the cost of the marketing initiative. Here are the results from an advert ran in a email newsletter. (This is an American example – easy to note given the huge number of emails).

In this example the client ran one Advert in a business newsletter that was delivered to half a million email addresses (NZ mailing lists are typically 1 percent or less in size). Only 25 leads were generated from half a million emails and the click through rate below the industry average at 0.06 percent. On the face of it this campaign looks like it was highly unsuccessful – until the projected revenue statistic and the cost of the campaign statistic are applied. By tying the leads to projected sales the success of this campaign looks fantastic and is the wake up call required.

Here are a couple tips for gauging the success of email marketing:

1. Ensure your email campaigns are tracked and the statistics presented. Why waste time creating an email campaign if you can not measure its success!
2. Put links to relevant web pages in your email campaign and assess the success in tracking conversions from leads to sales so you can assess the real ROI for email marketing

Working smarter not harder - it’s not as easy as it sounds except when it comes to email marketing. Whether you run a business as a marketer for your clients products or services or you are promoting your own, the job is made a lot easier when you can measure the results with email metrics tracking to assist you.

Why? Well for starters as soon as you release your email campaign to your mailing list you can view the delivery and within a short period know who received your message unlike a physical letter box drop (direct mail marketing) where your flyers may not end up in the number of homes you anticipate.

Measuring the success of a marketing campaign is important for realising the ROI yet many businesses are slow to put a lot of effort into analysing the return for a particular channel or marketing medium utilised and this is understandable as some of the most popular mediums do not provide detailed feedback.

Over the last couple of years we have witnessed a major shift in advertising spend with a higher percentage being dedicated to measurable marketing initiatives especially online advertising banners, email and txt marketing. The drivers for the shift in spend are competition, squeezed profit margins and just plain ‘moving with the times’ – reaching out to the generations that spend more time on their computers and mobile phones.

Email Campaign Reports should be an integral part of your email marketing initiative. A trained eye analysing your campaign feedback can provide you with focus, ideas and of course results – more subscriptions, more sales. ‘Yes’ is the answer (just in case I haven’t answered the question presented earlier) – email campaign statistics can be extremely valuable for improving your success rate. It all comes back to working smarter. When you want to improve in an activity you get advice, mentoring, coaching etc. Improving your ability to reach out to your customers and prospects also requires the same analysis and instruction. Consider our Email Campaign Reporting for your next email campaign.

I have decided to create a series of articles on email marketing for small business after helping numerous of our small business clients with their email marketing strategies.  The one common element I have found is that they are all scared to venture into this space for fear of being marked as spammer and losing customers.

That’s a valid and realistic concern and if you don’t know the basics of ethical email marketing you will more than likely end up doing exactly that.

Now before I get into writing up the articles I need to add a huge disclaimer for all you people out there that consider any business sending email to be a spammer.

Email marketing is not spamming IF the subscribers who received the email have asked for it and you as the email marketer stick to the frequency of mail outs you stated to the subscriber when they subscribed and lastly you honor their unsubscribe requests.

For example we have one client who every day sends an email to their subscribers containing property news. How can they be a spammer when:

1. The subscribers have to go through a confirmed opt-in process before they are even added to the mailing lists,
2. The client sends the emails at the frequency that is stated on the subscription web page.
3. The client does not add any email addresses to the list,
4. Our system automatically processes all bounces and unsubscribe requests,
5. The client immediately removes any requests for unsubscribes if the subscriber does not use the links provided within their emails,
6. They use a professional email service provider to delivery and managed their email campaigns (that’s us by the way) and keep them honest.

So with the disclaimer out of the way I would like to present my ideas for the articles. Please contact me if you would like other topics or to provide suggestions with my current ideas. Topics I will cover are:

1. Why should small business use email marketing?
2. Common concepts and terminology used within email marketing
3. How much should I spend on email marketing and how do I calculate ROI?
4. Why use an email service provider (ESP) to managed email marketing
5. What content should I offer my subscribers?
6. Understanding the subscriber and their dangerous habits
7. How to attract and keep subscribers
8. Mailing lists and mail list hygiene
9. How to correctly format emails
10. How to understand and utilise email campaign statistics
11. More complex email marketing strategies such as segmentation, Autoresponders

Whew! So that’s the topic list so far. I am keeping the topics high level enough not to be boring for business people but detailed enough that you don’t need to hire an email marketing expert.