7 Ways To Boost Your
Email Marketing

To be cost-effective a marketing tactic must deliver good Return on Investment. Intelligent marketers should always be on the lookout for tools that are lower cost and generate the best response rates. Email can cost as little as a few cents per message. Because it’s so easy to segment lists and adjust messages email also allows marketers to test the water and change the message to ensure the very best response rates.

And it’s not just marketers who like email. The recipients like it too.

In a 2007 poll by MarketingSherpa.com 86% of US adult internet users said they opened their opt-in emails with and even more impressive 55% saying they did this "always", "very often" or "frequently". Clearly customers are comfortable with email as a marketing channel, which is backed by the results of a survey in February 2008 by ExactTarget in which email was ranked behind only direct marketing as an acceptable consumer marketing channel.

Recent economic events spell hard times for business and in particular for marketers. Traditionally in a recession it’s the marketing budget that bears the brunt of the cutbacks. According to an Epsilon survey of senior US marketers in September 2008 79% agreed that during a downturn marketing budgets get chopped. And it’s the same the world over.

Sounds like bad news doesn’t it?

And yet email is consistently ranked by marketers in the top three online marketing tactics for return on investment, behind only search engine organic and paid search advertising.

Find out how using email to market your business is the right tactic for difficult times.

There are several aspects to the challenge of building business using a database. Escalating costs of printing and distribution, the time it can take to put together a direct mail piece, the problems of not knowing who actually responds and customers with shorter and shorter attention spans are all hurdles that effective marketers must face.

1. Cost: Communicating with a large database can be costly in traditional media. A printed mail drop will cost at least $1 per recipient. The costs of using email are much lower, usually in the region of just a few cents per recipient.
2. Time: Putting together a traditional mail drop takes time and will often involve several layers of specialist (designers, copywriters, printers, mail stuffers, distribution networks). You’ll often have to allow several weeks to get your message out. An email communication can be put together and distributed in hours.
3. Response: Unless you use a digital media such as email or mobile, you have very little idea what the direct response to your communication is. With email you know who receives the communication, who opens it, who clicks through to what information and even who goes on to make a purchase.
4. Immediacy: In these days of the multi-media environment, your database members are likely to have shorter attention spans that ever before, which spells trouble for traditional direct mail. Email allows the recipients to act right then and there before they have a chance to forget about you.