E-mail marketing in 2006

Canada will be a leader in the e-mail marketing industry [1] in 2006 because delivery, opening and click rates are higher than in the United States [2]. What makes a good e-mail marketing campaign in 2006?

An internal list or a list owned by an editor with a click rate of about 10% will have better success than a “rented” list (only 4%).

Now you know what to compare yourself with if your company operates in Canada.

Campaign objectives and expected results

Speaking of improvements, there’s nothing more important than setting a clear objective. Even if e-mail marketing is the marketing tool that most executives intend to use [3], this doesn’t mean that they all have a clear campaign objective.

The most popular objectives are to retain existing clients, and acquire new ones. E-mail marketing also excels in increasing the notoriety of a brand, reactivating a dormant client base or even generating immediate action on the receiver’s part.

List quality

As described by my associate Simon Lamarche in his article on the importance of segmentation in e-mail marketing, the more targeted your list is, the better your results will be. What are effective list creation techniques?

Several small actions make all the difference. First off, you need to want to create this list for everyone: salespeople add the names of those who want information, customer services do the same when a client calls them, additional website information can be provided in exchange for e-mail subscription. Perhaps your sales-team does an overseas presentation and requests the business cards of the attendees in the room so that they can get a copy. These are all occasions which, when put together, make a great list. There are no miracle procedures that can produce significant results in record time (other than viral campaigns, perhaps), but you always need a good base to start with.

Challenges to overcome

After spam, which advertising executives must compose into e-mail marketing, content creation is referred to as the most important challenge to overcome. I often hear my clients assert that they find content list preparation a long and tiresome process, which is true, but there is no better way of reaching such a large number of people at such low costs than e-mail (the second best return on investment after the telephone [4]). Furthermore, they won’t even go back to the previous method, the experience is that positive. Content creation is certainly difficult and needs continual renewal, but it is, in my opinion, THE success factor for an e-mail campaign.

Permission management

We all know that permission management is a very important criterion for list quality. This couldn’t be truer than for consumer marketing, where 60% of companies declare that they use a single or double opt-in process for permission management. However, they are much more comfortable in not doing so and are satisfied with opt-out (sending without permission but allowing receivers to withdraw) when conducting B2B communications, with only 20% using opt-in [5].

According to those who conducted the study [5], this is explainable by the fact that as an employee or worker, we are less frigid when receiving unsolicited e-mails as we need a lot of information to do our work.

Measuring results

We often forget to strictly measure campaigns to improve from one to the other, ensuring that new members are always added to the list, that the majority receive and open the bulletin, etc.

Many tools and services on the market don’t yet provide this basic information: delivery, opening and click rates, essential data to conduct great client-relation operations.

Prepare your sending strategy thoroughly: content, frequency, presentation, etc. to ensure consistency in your communications. A clearly defined strategy will enable your dispatches to lever all your other marketing efforts and help the creation process and refinement of your list, which could be your company’s most important activity in a few years.

[1] http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003877

[2] A study done in March 2006 comparing the known results from companies specialising in sending mass e-mails in Canada and the USA. http://www.iabcanada.com/

[3] 70% of them intended to use it in the next 6 months, before all other forms of marketing CMO Magazine, April 2005.

[4] Direct Marketing Association, October 2004

[5] Direct Magazine and Multichannel Merchant Magazine, March 2006