I had a conversation this morning with a prospective customer about email marketing. I heard the all too familiar refrain… Really, what’s the value of email forus? I mean do our customers read email?
Ok, One more time. Email like many things in life works exceedingly well when it’s done well.
The Direct Marketing Asssociation in their “Power of Direct” 2007 reported email marketing “continues to deliver the highest ROI…over $51 for every $1 spent”. You know what, we’ve seen that return and higher with our Clients.
The fact is, if you don’t have an email newsletter, then starting one is probably the single highest ROI program you can start.
Yet most email marketing is not done so well. Most email marketing is not segmented, targeted, or personalised. Vanilla emails “blasted” once a month (sound familiar?) may do more damage to our relationship with the subscriber than good.
Here’s an exercise any marketing executive should take today. Take a step back, step into your customers shoes. Think about their needs, wants, interests and pain. Now what is it you would say to them if you had them on the phone for a few minutes. What would you react to if they said it? You can listen you know with email too… not to their words as on the phone, but you can “listen” to their opens, clicks, and post click actions –and most enterprise email marketing software will allow you to automatically respond to those actions and behaviors.
Email marketing has been proclaimed dead more times in my career than I can remember. Most recently of course, its been proclaimed the new hot thing amongst Internet marketers. Amazing.
With oceans of opportunity awaiting you, why not do the exercise I describe here, and write your first email. Then look at what segments of customers you have, and send the right email to the right customer… hows that for actionable.
If it feels like to much work, call us. We’re happy to give you some pointers on whats wrong in the process. Otherwise why not go and hunt that $51 to $1 invested that’s out there for your organization today with some smarter email marketing.