How Effective is email marketing to businesses today?

Answered by Priya Chetty on October 13, 2011 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

To-days businesses depend, in a very considerable extent, on the effectiveness of email marketing. Implementing an effective email marketing communication platform involves multiple tasks, such as building a permission-based list of recipients, managing the list, defining relevant content in the right format, delivering the message and evaluating the results. With best email marketing practices, companies will experience the return on investment required to justify expenditure. (L-Soft whitepaper, 2010)

Effective email marketing and businesses

The many well-known benefits of e-mail marketing in comparison with traditional direct marketing have been summarized by Gartner G2 (Chaffey, 2007). According to these analysts, email marketing offers the following: (i) higher response rates, on average, response rates are between 6 and 8 per cent for permission based email–a significantly higher figure than in the majority of direct marketing campaigns; (ii) a shorter duration for campaign creation; (iii) a more rapid response, it is reported that responses to e-mail accumulate in an average of three days, while direct mail requires an average response time of three to six weeks; (iv) a faster overall cycle-cycle time, it is suggested that the overall cycle time of an e-mail campaign from creation to delivery and response is one-tenth the time of traditional direct mail; (v) lower costs, it is estimated that, currently, e-mail costs range from $5 to $7 per thousand compared to $500 to $700 per thousand for direct mail. (Chaffey, 2007)

The effectiveness of email marketing also depends on the measures as follows: number of emails sent, number of emails delivered, number of e-mails get thrown to the inbox, number of emails opened, number of click throughs, number of completed responses etc.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that the effectiveness of email marketing could be evaluated by modeling different combinations of the number of emails sent, clickthrough rates, completion rates and conversion rates, etc. It is a matter of hope that to-days many markets are going on the emailing effectively to their businesses.

References:

Chaffey, D,. 2007. Total E-mail Marketing: maximizing your results from integrated e-marketing. 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann (an imprint of Elsevier).
L-Soft whitepaper, 2010. Email Marketing Best Practices: winning techniques for today and tomorrow. [online] Available at: http://www.lsoft.com/resources/pdf/wp-EmailMarketingBestPractices.pdf [Accessed on 1st October, 2011].