Posted by Gareth Cutter on 24th November 2008 to
Best Practice Email marketing has become well-known for its robust Return On Investment (ROI) in recent months but it shouldn't be taken for granted: more goes into ROI than a low-cost per send.
Recent figures have it that not all marketers are using their time wisely when creating campaigns. An average of 19 hours is spent on a single one with most of the effort devoted to manual, in-house administrative and design tasks. This equates to £800 per campaign, or an average of £41,600 over the space of a year. What's worse, none of this work aids the deliverability of the message.
These 'hidden' costs are what eat into the overall ROI of email marketing, both directly and indirectly. The focus on administration and design of campaigns stunts sales-conversion rates. Excessive and/or inappropriate use of HTML leads to emails being blocked by SPAM filters so the message never arrives to the recipient. In many cases, a plain background would be more suitable at drawing attention to the copy, which if written correctly will be content-rich and targeted.
Which brings us back to the main ingredients of a successful email campaign: targeting and optimisation. The real work should be spent on testing and perfecting the message so that when the email arrives in the recipient's inbox, it appeals to their interest, their wants and their needs. Most of the administrative and design work can be easily outsourced to professional agencies and service providers. The efficiency with which these specialists can assemble and transmit campaigns means the initial cost of using their services is offset by the returns on your more successful email campaign.
There's clearly a need for a service of this kind: 48% of marketers say that disconnected systems stop them improving the deliverability and conversion-rate of their email campaigns - an exceptionally (and unnecessarily) high figure when you consider the amount of knowledge and help that's out there, waiting at the ready.
