e-marketing: 8 top tips for improving ROI

by Matthew Robins, Managing Director

E-marketing is one of the fastest growing disciplines in marketing, as proven by the rapid recent growth in the number of specialist e-marketing agencies.

In the same period, spam has been a growing problem for both consumers and businesses, and CEOs have rightly been demanding ever better ROI measurement from their marketing departments.

So what do you need to be thinking about to get the best possible return from your campaigns?

1.   Deliverability is all

So, your list has 5000 email addresses in it. But are they up to date? And accurate? And can you be sure the recipients spam filter or firewall will recognize your mail server as bona fide? It doesn’t matter how good your content is if it only gets to half of your "list" or you annoy people buy mailing them seven times! Put effort into getting the data right and de-duplicating, and take steps to avoid being blacklisted as a "spammer".

2.   Personalise it

Not just "Dear John", but personalized and relevant content. The more relevant, the better it’ll be received. And avoid dropping your list into the "bcc" field in Outlook – your mail is less likely to treated as spam.

3.   Brand it to build trust

As an e-marketer, your worst enemy is the spam phenomenon. Make sure your recipients recognize you quickly to avoid the delete-finger reflex.

4.   Offer value

Value in an email campaign is a relative concept. Depending on your business and audience it might be represented by a price-based special offer (April offer – buy one, get one free), a time-based offer (Beaujolais Nouveau now available – limited cases – order now!), free knowledge sharing (8 top tips for improving your e-marketing ROI!) or just extreme relevance (think Amazon’s recommendations based on your purchase history.)

5.   Make it eye scannable

People are impatient when reading websites. And they’re even more impatient when reading an e-newsletter. In 2006 research the Nielsen Norman Group concluded that the average time given to a newsletter after opening it is 51 seconds. This means your content has to be supremely well organized – and friendly to the eye scanning behaviour of the typical reader - to get your readers from open to action without a premature delete. Which brings us neatly to tip number 6...

6.   Make action easy

You’re not mailing people for the sake of something to do, and – unless you’re very lucky with timing - they won’t do anything unless you ask them to and make it as easy as possible. And link through to the page on your website where they can do what they want to do quickly without having to click any further.

7.   Respect their privacy

You must allow recipients to unsubscribe, and you must act in good faith on their request. Sending to someone who’s already unsubscribed is the cardinal sin of e-marketing, and as well as being unethical in certain circumstances it’s illegal. So make sure your systems and processes are bomb-proof.

8.   Measure like crazy

The days of "send and wait" are gone. How many recipients opened your mail? How many clicked through to your site? How does frequency affect open and click-through rates? Make sure your systems enable you to measure, hone, refine and improve. Measurement is at the heart of continuous improvement.

Need help?

We can provide e-marketing consultancy and project management to help you get the very best return on your campaigns. Read more.

We’ve also launched a new managed bulk mail service to help our clients capitalise on the e-marketing opportunity whilst addressing the challenges of spam and measurement. Read more, or contact Matthew Robins on 01534 488808.