This month, Internet Retailer released its latest email marketing survey results, which showed some bullish signs for those attempting to drum up business by sending electronic mail to its customers. The study surveyed 275 chain retailers, web-only retailers, catalogers, and consumer brand manufacturers. Even if you are not a retailer or manufacturer, there are some helpful lessons for you.
The big take away is that email marketing is working well for most companies engaged in it, despite what we like to call the GEC (saying it that way is a tad more cheery than saying “global economic collapse”). Despite the adverse economy, 56.4% of retailers surveyed reported the same email marketing conversion rates as last year — and as many have said about the GEC, “flat is the new up.” Furthermore, 22.8% of survey respondents are seeing email conversions “up slightly,” and 3.7% up significantly. That’s a whopping 83% (rounded) doing the same or better than last year. Just 17% say that conversion is down (13.7% down slightly, 3.3% down significantly).
That’s staggering if you stop to think about it. What other barometers of business activity, other than perhaps foreclosures and bankruptcies, are up so strongly post-GEC? I would guess that many of those 275 retailers and manufacturers surveyed are down overall as a business, with email conversion gains offset by setbacks in other forms of marketing and sales.
I said earlier that there is a take away for everybody, and it is this: any business, and I include most non-profits and other organizations, that is not doing email marketing is missing a huge opportunity. If you are doing email marketing, how can you do it more frequently, or more effectively? The ROI is there: the article suggests that the cost to reach a customer via direct mail is 50 cents to a dollar, versus pennies for email (possibly more depending on your design and production requirements, but in general the cost of email is never anywhere close to the cost of direct mail). If you’re an experienced email marketer, refer to the full Internet Retailer results to see how you stack up on metrics such as email open rate, conversion rate, number of emails sent per month, and percent of company sales driven by email. If you’re new to the subject, check out our email marketing learning center.
Comments on this entry are closed.