Posted by Gareth Cutter on 28th July 2009 to
Industry A recent report into email marketing trends and benchmarks has discovered that the open rates of received emails increased by 11% in the first quarter of 2009, and that click-through rates within those emails reached a high of 6.1%. All of this is great news and should be taken by marketing managers who are considering opening an email channel as encouragement; they can measure improvements such as these in the reporting facilities of their own campaigns.
What often goes unrecorded is how many of those recipients went and made a purchase offline, or received the email and typed the sender’s web address directly into their address bar instead of clicking a link.
Further in-depth research has shown that this kind of behaviour is common. The percentage of consumers who made an offline purchase because of an email marketing campaign was 37% in Europe.
It has therefore been speculated that the return on investment (ROI) of email marketing could be three times what has already been estimated by the Direct Marketing Association (this is without taking into account how email can influence behaviour on social media sites and drive word-of-mouth).
All the evidence suggests that now is the perfect time for businesses to open new email marketing channels or upgrade their existing ones. Widespread acceptance of B2B and B2C emails is settling in, and while the recession lingers on businesses need to consider the return on investment of all their efforts. As the far-reaching impacts of email marketing becomes more evident, the stronger an investment opportunity it will become.
