Trends and Best Practices in E-Mail Marketing

MARCH 13, 2009



Bill Nussey
President and CEO
Silverpop

eMarketer: What is e-mail marketing’s greatest strength?

Bill Nussey: What makes e-mail marketing unique is the ability to both broadcast and target individual personalized content at the same time. It’s also relatively inexpensive compared with other media.

eMarketer: What is its greatest weakness?

Mr. Nussey: E-mail’s greatest weakness is that some marketers use it too aggressively, and they undermine the value of e-mail for all other marketers and consumers.

Obviously, what I’m talking about is spam, selling me drugs or high school or college diplomas, or other such nonsense, and that makes an otherwise pretty good medium less valuable for everybody.

eMarketer: Do you think that consumers’ use of e-mail has changed in ways that e-mail marketers need to be cognizant of?

Mr. Nussey: Absolutely. Specifically—and there’s been studies on this—consumers are only willing to have a finite number of online e-mail offers at a given time.

“Consumers are only willing to have a finite number of online e-mail offers at a given time.”

For example, my neighbor might only be willing to have 10 or 12 e-mail newsletters, promotions or other subscriptions at any given time, and he might delete, unsubscribe or spam-button the ones that are no longer interesting to him.

A lot of marketers think of their e-mail programs in isolation, or if they do think about competition, they think about other companies like them. But truly what they’re competing for is the very limited attention that consumers and business recipients have for all e-mail, for the channel. So marketers need to be sure that they are one of those dozen or so active subscriptions that their target audience is actually paying attention to.

eMarketer: Are there other changes in the way that people communicate or use e-mail?

Mr. Nussey: Many, many. One that marketers new to e-mail marketing don’t pick up on is that when most consumers are no longer interested in a subscription, rather than unsubscribing, they hit the spam button. So there’s yet another major incentive for marketers to remain relevant, to remain engaged with their recipient base—rather than just press the blast button every week.

eMarketer: Even if I opt in, and then later on get bored with a particular retailer’s e-mail message, instead of unsubscribing, I press the spam button. If that happens enough, that could hurt the retailer’s ability to send e-mails to other customers who want to receive them, is that correct?

Mr. Nussey: Yes, and it’s very common. In fact that’s what most people do now.

eMarketer: Is there a way that an e-mail service provider can figure out how not to punish a retailer because of a certain group of people who are pressing the spam button when they should really be unsubscribing?

Mr. Nussey: Look at the activity of individual recipients on your list over the last six or 12 months, and people that are fundamentally inactive—who haven’t clicked, haven’t opened, haven’t purchased—take ’em off your list. What you really need to be concerned about is total respondents and total conversion rates, not how big your list is.

But if that’s not available to you because your boss wants the list to remain large, put up a profile page and ask people the kind of things they want to receive. Ask them the frequency they want to receive their promotions. Typically when people get frustrated and hit the unsubscribe button it’s usually because the marketer is sending too often or allowing messages to be sent from other brands that people didn’t subscribe to.

Keep the list extremely private and deal with the purposes people opted in for. That alone will pretty much keep you in the green zone for good e-mail marketing.

“Keep...in the green zone for good e-mail marketing.”

eMarketer: Are most Web retailers sending e-mails that people have opted in to receive?

Mr. Nussey: My company does a study every year, and we look at the patterns and trends in e-mail marketing for retailers. Based on our research, the vast majority—well above 90% of all online retailers of all sizes—have an e-mail capture on their Website.

The Powerful Potential of Permission-Based E-Mail

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

The majority of customers who receive e-mail from a company have a more positive image of that company.

Really?

According to “Beyond the Click: The Indirect Value of Email,” from Epsilon and ROI Research, 57% of consumers had a more positive impression of companies they had purchased from when they received e-mail from them—and 40% said such e-mail made a future purchase from the company more likely.

Getting consumers to sign up for permission e-mails may be difficult, but the effort is worth it when 84% said they liked receiving e-mail from companies they had registered with—and more than one-half saved the messages for later review.

Even when consumers have to wade through hundreds of spam messages, they appreciate receiving relevant information.

“E-mail builds loyalty and brand awareness and drives on- and off-line behavior,” said Kevin Mabley, senior vice president of Epsilon Strategic Services.

To test this thesis, Epsilon looked more closely at one particular category in its “Flying High: Measuring the Value of Email Marketing for the Travel Industry” report.

“In the travel industry where so much activity has moved to the online arena, it’s crucial that companies communicate effectively and efficiently with their customers,” said Mr. Mabley.

In fact, recipients of travel e-mail showed even higher loyalty than retail, consumer packaged goods, pharma or finance category recipients, with 63% saying in October 2008 that they were more likely to buy from companies that sent them e-mail.

A whopping 92% of respondents who received travel e-mail thought it was a “great way” to learn about new products and offerings.

More importantly, consumers often took easily measurable actions such as booking online, clicking links and downloading coupons after receiving e-mail from a travel company.

How Much Money are You Losing with CPA Offers?

• 27 Comments
• By Zac Johnson on December 23rd, 2008

Think back to your last killer ad campaign. How many sign ups did you send to the back end company? Probably thousands… and you probably made several thousands of dollars in cash during the process. Seems like good money, but you received your money while the back end company is still cashing in on those users every day! You paid the cost to acquire that lead, why not keep them around a little longer? Here’s how…

Instead of Getting Paid Once for a Lead, Get Paid Several Times Over

STEP 1: Signup to Aweber… it’s only $20 a month and it will pay for itself in the long run!
Why do you need Aweber? Simply because it’s one of the best mailing and automated systems around! Through Aweber you will build an awesome mailing list to continually up sell to your site visitors, that will keep generating money for you forever! Don’t want to spend $20 a month, there are other free mailers and autoresponders around, but Aweber gets the job done for me.

STEP 2: Create a Site / Landing Page
Instead of direct linking to your ad campaign, you should have your own landing page or site. If you already have a landing page, perfect. Instead of pushing your site visitor off to your cpa landing page, have them submit their email address first. You can keep your current site or landing page in tact, just remove the links and add in a submission form.

STEP 3: The Process
- Promotion: You can promote your cpa offer the same way you always have, whether that be ppc, social networks or organic search.

- Building Your Landing Page: If you have a cpa offer that has a landing page that sells itself, you don’t need to write much on your site. You just need to list key points and get the user to submit their email.

- Email Process: Once the user hits your landing page, the goal is to get them to submit their email. In the chart above, I show my free landing page template which explains the key points on the offer. I would then have a subscribe form on that page which tell the user to submit their email to receive “Five Quick Weight Loss Tips“, or simply to ask the user to input their info to see if they are qualified. This form would be through Aweber. After the submission of the form, the user can then be passed on to the affiliate offer, which they originally came for. Through Aweber, this is a double-opt in process. If you have an alternative mailing solution, you can increase conversions by doing single opt in, and sending the user right to the offer after they submit their info.

Not only have you now engaged the user into a process, increasing the chance they will signup for your end offer, but you now have their email address on record. Once they receive that email from Aweber to confirm their info, you can follow up to them with other related offers, or setup an auto-responder to send them an email a few days later and ask if they requested their free trial.

The opportunities here are limitless and open to any niche market. Get creative and you may find some new ways to heavily increase your ROI. Don’t let your next big ad campaign only make you money once… but forever.

E-Mail Marketers Get in the Spirit

NOVEMBER 26, 2008

Working to break through malaise and get consumers to shop

Marketers have stepped up their holiday e-mail blitzes with steep discounts and subject-line countdowns such as “5 Days Left to Save Up to 75%,” deadlines like “Buy 1 $50 Item By Dec. 5 And Get Another Free” and “Free Shipping When You Order By Dec. 21.”

Marketers can use e-mail to create a sense of urgency in the last six weeks of the year, according to Huw Griffiths, director of marketing for e-mail marketing software company Campaigner. Mr. Griffiths said e-mail marketers should pay special attention to messaging and be crystal clear about shipping dates, return policies and fees.

Mr. Griffiths also said marketers should think about how consumers view e-mail messages, in HTML or text, and should always test before sending.

“Testing e-mail is one of the most critical things that retailers can do,” he said. “It could be just two words that are different in the subject line. Set up a small subscriber base and test different things like subject lines and calls to action, then compare the two.”

That might seem like obvious advice, but it often goes unheeded. More than one-half of US online retailers surveyed in September 2008 by Knowledge Marketing for Internet Retailer said they did not test their e-mail subject lines.

Kohl’s announced it will start dangling 25 “deals” before Christmas online and in stores. Consumers will opt in for e-mail alerts for the deal of the day and can have them delivered by desktop widget. Similarly, Wal-Mart is sending text message alerts with holiday promotions to an opt-in list. And Sugar, an online publisher of lifestyle content for women, introduced a personalized e-mail service about sales on apparel and home goods.

The year-end e-mail push is something of a last hurrah, as e-mail marketing spending growth is set to drop to 3.5% in 2009, down from 11.3% in 2008.

The slip in e-mail ad spending represents growth at a time when most traditional media ad spending is shrinking, but is still a shift from the double-digit boom of the past few years.

Study shows how spammers cash in

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.

By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer.

The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of pounds in profit every year.

It also suggests that spammers may be susceptible to attacks that make it more costly to send junk mail.

Slim pickings

The spam study was carried out in early 2008 by computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD).

For their month-long study the seven-strong team of computer scientists infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail.

At its height Storm was believed to have more than one million machines under its control.

The team, led by Assistant Professor Stefan Savage from UCSD, took over a chunk of the Storm network to make it easier to run their study.

"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

They created several so-called "proxy bots" that acted as conduits of information between the command and control system for Storm and the hijacked home PCs that actually send out junk mail.

The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them.

Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. One mimicked the way Storm spreads using viruses and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido.

The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's real owners but always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign.

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers.

The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers.

Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year.

While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past.

They suggest that the tight costs might also open up new avenues of attack on spammers.

The researchers concluded: "The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses."

Social Media and E-Mail Spending to Rise

MAY 29, 2008

Drawing more budget away from print

More than three-quarters of marketers surveyed said they will increase their social media spending during the next three years, according to Eloqua's "State of the Marketer" report. A full 74% said they plan to increase their direct e-mail spending while about two-thirds will spend more on mobile texting and SMS.

Respondents were bullish on online ad spending overall, with nine out of 10 saying they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets. The spending increases are likely to come at the expense of print ads, since 55% of respondents said they will probably decrease print ad spending in the next three years.

The planned increase in social network ad spending is consistent with eMarketer's projections of nearly $2.4 billion in 2011, up from $1.4 billion this year.

Likewise, eMarketer estimates e-mail ad spending will jump to $677 million in 2011, from $492 million in 2008.

The jump in mobile texting and SMS is also in line with eMarketer's projections, which call for $3.8 billion in mobile messaging ad spending in 2011, up from almost $1.5 billion this year.

To learn more about how online advertisers plan to spend this year, read eMarketer's US Online Advertising: Resilient in a Rough Economy report.

E-Mail Marketing Still Works

APRIL 21, 2008

But consumer standards of relevance are high.
First, the good news: permission-based e-mail is great at getting consumers to buy.

Half of US adult e-mail users surveyed in April 2008 for Merkle's "View from the Inbox" study, conducted with Harris Interactive, said they had made an online purchase in the previous year as a result of permission-based marketing.

In addition, e-mail was second only to customer reviews on Web sites for influencing online purchases, according to DoubleClick Performics' "Green Marketing Study," conducted by Opinion Research Corporation in February 2008. E-mail was roughly equal to search results in terms of influencing online purchases.

Bad news for e-mail marketers included the fact that consumers are increasingly willing to revoke permission that they have previously granted and that the bar for relevance remains high.

About one-third of respondents in the Merkle study also said they had stopped doing business with at least one company as a result of poor e-mail marketing practices.

In the same vein, more than half of US adult e-mail users told Merkle in 2007 that they were only willing to get marketing or promotional messages in status or transactional e-mails if the offers were relevant to them.

"There is a substantial gap between what marketers believe is relevant to the consumer, and what consumers rate as valuable," said Lori Connolly, director of research at Merkle.

"Traditionally, marketers believed that relevancy meant pushing content that is based on stated preferences or behavior, but companies need to update their view of what is relevant," Ms. Connolly said.

Consumer wariness is often justified. Some marketers are the victims of spammers, who ruin it for everyone, according to David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.

"Consumers welcome relevant, opt-in e-mails from companies they have a relationship with," said Mr. Hallerman. "But the broad spectrum of spam—any unsolicited message—continues to degrade the e-mail environment for all parties."

The eMarketer US Online Ad Targeting report will be published next month. Click here to be notified when it is released.

E-Mail Tactics Help Determine Winners

MARCH 19, 2008

Personalization helps.

The workhorse of digital marketing has been through some muddy terrain.

E-mail, a tactical mainstay of many campaigns, saw open rates dip worldwide during the second half of 2007, according to data from e-mail list management company MailerMailer.

Overall open rates for messages sent through the company fell by several percentage points from the rates seen in the first half of 2007.

Still, some e-mail tactics performed better than others.

Looking at personalization, the company said that e-mails that had only the subject line personalized did worse than those with no personalization at all, probably because spammers often gear their subject lines toward recipients.

MailerMailer found that open rates were highest on Mondays, Tuesdays, and the weekends. The company also said that e-mails with shorter subject lines significantly outperformed e-mails with longer subject lines.

As for click-through, the more links the better. E-mails with 20 or more links got about twice as many clicks as those with fewer links in the MailerMailer study.

The open rates in the MailerMailer worldwide study were below those for US campaigns measured in Harte-Hanks' last "Postfuture Index," which focused specifically on opt-in campaigns.

Harte-Hanks told eMarketer that when it conducted the 2006 measurement, the formula used to calculate open rates included total opens (multiple opens by the same person for the same message), which led to a higher number of open rates—sometimes exceeding 100%.

The company said that it now counts only unique opens (only counting a recipient once for the same message), in line with industry norms. Based on unique opens, the open rate is 20.4% across its client base, in line with MailerMailer's findings.

How to deliver on B2B email campaigns

By G. Simms Jenkins

The goal of most business-to-business emails is to acquire leads, but most miss the mark and do more damage than good. Follow these best practices for better results.

Business-to-business email campaigns, as a generalization, look and feel the same to me. Many show up looking like long-winded, copy heavy, direct mail solicitations. Some have one giant image with marketing department-focused jargon. Most seem to miss the mark in understanding what may attract the right buyer and how to deliver real value and relevancy to the inbox.

Goals of B2B emails
Let's examine the right approach to ensuring your B2B email campaigns help close the gap on your sales cycle, rather than damaging your new business opportunities.

The goal of most B2B email campaigns is to acquire leads, often accomplished by a white paper, webinar or case study, which require registration to obtain or attend. Make the path to the registration page easy for customers to transition to from the email.

For some high level, business-focused email campaigns, the goal is not to get an immediate click/lead but to get the email read and forwarded to the right person. Think about selling high cost software or IT equipment. Very few people will buy a $200,000 piece of equipment based on one email message. But if done correctly, your campaigns can get noticed by the right decision makers and the real one-to-one dialogue can begin.

Getting the email noticed and read can be a matter of feeding the ego, particularly on C-level messaging efforts. Make sure you acknowledge the importance (real or perceived) of your audience members and their time. Throwing them a bone can help get you noticed.

How to achieve your goals
Here are some best practices in B2B email marketing:

• Know your audience: If you are mailing to IT network administrators, an image-heavy newsletter probably will not be well received. Instead, send a text-only message. Follow the cues of what your audience is like and don't take a one-size-fits-all approach.
  
  
• Mobile email triage is real: Escape the mobile email gauntlet. An increasing number of business executives use their mobile devices/PDAs to perform email triage. This means that if you have a weak message or lack something compelling or of immediate value to your email, you may have the busy exec delete your email while in a meeting. On the flip side, a unique email with a relevant purpose may get saved for the executive to read in the office.
  
  
• Make it easy for the mobile audience: Click here to read on your mobile phone is becoming more commonplace on B2B emails and may help you escape mobile email rendering snafus.
  
  
• From & Subject lines: Emails from a CEO to a fellow executive tend to resonate. Ensure your From line is from someone who matters. Combine this with a short Subject line that can break through the clutter while demonstrating a reason for the user to read this email.
  
  
• Short and sweet: Whether read on an iPhone or laptop, make your message count. That means make sure it gets read. Long emails without clear calls to action will get skimmed and deleted. Make your value proposition above the fold and obvious to the people that will browse over your email looking for a reason to read (or delete).
  
  
• Don't oversell: Too many promises, customer raves or pricing information may overwhelm your audience and diminish your opportunity to have people click on a link where they can find the details of the service or product being offered.
  
  
• Respect the audience's time: Frequency is a significant issue for all mailings, but if a business subscriber doesn't respond to the first two messages, it doesn't mean you should send to him even more frequently.
  
  
• Test: I received seven different emails from a lead generation company in the span of five minutes this morning. The emails actually contained decent messaging and links to at least one relevant case study. They had me until hello occurred seven times. Someone was asleep at the wheel when the campaigns were segmented and set. Do your due diligence before an email is sent as these campaigns did more damage than good.
  
  
• Offer something unique: A white paper can often work, but they are everywhere, aren't they? Provide access and perks that are gold to the C-suite audience. For example, one client attempting to register business executives for an annual event tested pricing breaks versus admission to a VIP event. Remember, the B2B audience usually isn't spending its own money so you can guess which offer performed better.
  
  
• Remarket: We had major success with one client recently by creating follow-up campaigns based on how each user responded (or didn't) to the initial campaign. Using your metrics can guide you to a better and more relevant strategy. (You can find the case study of how this client generated $120,000 from remarketing here.)

The final touches
A B2B email campaign is a different animal from a consumer campaign. Let's look at the three major differences:

• Tone
• Message
• Measurement

Don't spend countless hours writing flowery prose. Instead, spend time testing the right mix of design, messaging and calls to action.

Your tone should be much like it would be in a face-to-face meeting with your prospects: direct, professional and in a manner that makes your audience want to do business with you. Don't waste your time building up to the pitch -- state why you are sending this message and what's in it for the recipient.

The message should clearly articulate the purpose and value to the subscribers while making it easy for them to identify and act on any call to action. Don't bog them down with too many cross promotional messages or secondary marketing messages. Allow them to scan the email and find out what's in it for them.

Your main measurement analysis should not be based on opens and clicks but on how many leads are generated. Careful attention should be paid to forwards and any additional email subscriptions generated from the campaign. A high open and clickthrough rate but lack of leads could mean you put up too many barriers to capture the lead. Ensure your landing page and relevant gateway pages (for example, the white paper sign-up page) are easy to find and utilize. This may take some coordination that goes outside the realm of a typical email manager.

How To Develop Good Triggered Email Programs

by David Baker , Monday, March 3, 2008

THE PERFECT EMAIL IS ONE that is relevant to the consumer. Right? It's timely, in context, well-rendered and provides some sort of value. We don't often think of mass mailings as the perfect email. Even with dynamic content and segmentation, this relevance is hard to achieve.

For 10 years-plus, most resort to what we love to call triggered messaging. You get a response from the Web site when you sign up, purchase something, change your status, refer content to another. Today, with the rise of social networks, trigger messaging takes on a new breed. You are deluged with email from your social-networking site "in times of need." That can be in the form of notices from friends looking for jobs, new business opportunities, updated profiles, new content, new music, new events -- the list is endless.

The basis for it is flawless behaviorally driven communications. If you are like most professionals, belong to many feeds, several personal and professional social networking sites and have been reading the bloglines about digital marketing, you hear it and see it first hand and feel it everyday. Effective communications is a challenge. We've abused the phone and email. For marketers, it's a challenge to have less control over syndication. It wasn't too long ago that most organizations challenged the concept of viral content, since they would lose control of the "message," "frequency" and potentially relevance. Today, it's about syndication rather than control, and it's getting a bit out of hand.

Still, there are things marketers can control in this frenzy of communications: triggered email messages. Loren McDonald says I don't like to talk about email 101 very often, so let's take a step back into the basics of what and why a triggered message works.

1. The first step is to identify the potential behavioral events that you'd like to trigger. If you have a lead generation process, a commerce site or simply a functional content site, you have site, sales and customer events. All have many opportunities to deliver a message to your customer.

2. Once you've identified the "events," develop the business rules. This includes audience, the rules that govern this communication, including content and potentially frequency rules.

3. Develop a measurement instrument and hypothesis for the value of each message. Do you want to measure it? If so, how will you measure the impact? There are many gaps in technologies in trying to roll up reporting for triggered messaging. It's not as simple to look at response metrics as it is traditional email campaigns if set up improperly. One company I know has 450 event triggers. Imagine trying to roll up that report on a regular basis.

4. Develop a design system that brings continuity to your message and builds on the experience, creatively. If you are an image rich company and rely on text only triggered messages, reconsider your approach. Should your design system match that of your site, brand, product, stage?

5. Put values on each trigger event in terms of value to the consumer and objective based requirements. There are some messages that have to go out, and some that are optional. So ranking the triggers by priority is critical.

6. Develop a touch-point map to visually see how many touch points you have through email today. This will help you decide which triggers take priority, which you can measure, which can be used to help you understand the positive interactions with your company.

7. Understand your technical limitations. Some systems won't allow you to do anything advanced with content, targeting etc. Some are managed through several systems, so the ranking is important. It lets you know which messages bring the most value and any limitations in delivering the type of message you want.

8. Implement a few and wait. Measure the impact of those new triggers before trying to take on the 30 of so you may have on your touch-point map.

The analysis can take on new life, but since triggered messaging affords the highest response rates for email, it's the best place to begin to do response modeling. And it doesn't take a fully staffed team of analysts to do it.
Post your response to the public Email Insider blog.

See what others are saying on the Email Insider blog.
David Baker is vice president of email solutions at Avenue A/Razorfish. Visit his blog at http://whitenoiseinc.com

Datran Media debuts StormPost 4.0 with Facebook tools

Dianna Dilworth

February 27, 2008

Related Articles

• E-mail to grow, integrate more with other channels in '08: Datran

Online marketing services firm Datran Media has released StormPost 4.0, an expanded version of its StormPost platform that includes social media assets.

The updated platform merges Facebook social marketing tools with analytics and ad inventory management enhancements in a move to aid marketers to combine e-mail and database marketing with social media. With StormPost's Facebook tool, marketers can send personalized mass communications to social media content subscribers.

“We've found that there are folks who spend a lot of time on Facebook and do a lot of messaging there,” said Dave Hendricks, VP of marketing and strategy at Datran Media. “So we wanted to build a tool that would give marketers the opportunity to message there. It works great since Facebook is based on e-mail addresses and accepts messages from outside systems.”

While it is still early to say who will adopt this technology, Datran Media client Lionsgate, a film production company, has expressed interest in the product.

Other enhancements to StormPost 4.0 include upgrades to its user interface, trend-based reporting and inventory management features.

• Tags:
• Social Networks
• Internet Marketing

Online Marketers: Email Beats Search, Display Advertising

Eight in 10 marketers cite email as the best-performing medium, ahead of search and display, according to Datran Media’s second annual survey of 2,000 online marketing professionals conducted in December ‘07.

Moreover, 82% of the marketers surveyed indicated that they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2008, and 55% of the respondents said they expect ROI from email to be higher than any other channel.

Email ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008, more than twice the ROI of other mediums including search and display, said Datran Media, citing data from the Direct Marketing Association.
Among other findings of the Datran survey of online marketers:
Some 67% of respondents stated that email has helped boost sales through other channels. In these scenarios, email is a tool for sales as well as a media channel.
Search is the favored channel for complementing the email channel.

More than 80% of marketers send targeted email campaigns.
Additional findings, with charts, are available via Datran’s website.

Steady Growth for E-Mail Budgets

JANUARY 22, 2008

Shared budgets are still common.

Nearly three-quarters of e-mail marketers said in a recent survey that they plan to spend either the same amount or more on e-mail marketing in 2008 as they did last year.

The survey was part of MarketingSherpa's "E-Mail 2008: Top 10 Research Findings and Practical Ways to Increase E-Mail Performance" report.

More than a quarter of respondents said they would spend 1.5 times as much or more as they did in 2007.

"That speaks a lot toward digital media coming into adulthood," said Tim McAtee, senior analyst at MarketingSherpa. "Every [type of digital media spending] is coming up with it, but I do still feel that e-mail marketing can fight for a greater share of budget."

MarketingSherpa also said that many e-mail marketers had no separate budget line item for e-mail.

The company found that small in-house marketers were slightly more likely to say they had no specific e-mail marketing budget line item, but that a third of large in-house marketers said so as well.

eMarketer predicts that spending on e-mail marketing will grow by 5.1% in 2008, up 46% over 2007's growth rate. Marketing for both the national and local elections will contribute to this growth. Spending growth in 2010 will be similarly boosted on a smaller scale by election activity.

E-mail's low cost, which contributes to its popularity, also moderates growth. Because it is a low-cost medium, even relatively large increases in the number of commercial e-mails will not be reflected in large spending increases.

Because e-mail has typically been positioned as a low-cost tool, many companies look to spend correspondingly little for their e-mail marketing efforts.

Read how this low-profile digital marketing tool produces high-profile results. Get your copy of eMarketer's E-Mail Marketing: Getting Through to Customers report today.

E-Mail Marketing: $2.1 Billion in 2012

Great little snippet on email marketing from DM Confidential.

by Jason Hahn

According to a recent JupiterResearch report, e-mail marketing spending will grow from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2.1 billion in 2012.

Spending on retention e-mail efforts will more than double during that time period and will make up more than half of all e-mail marketing spending in 2012, while acquisition e-mail marketing will grow at a slower pace.

The report, titled “US E-mail Marketing Forecast, 2007 to 2012,” also touched upon what is expected for spam volume in the coming years. While spam volumes will grow, consumers may not notice any increase thanks to efforts by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure that these messages do not reach consumers.

David Daniels, Vice President and Research Director at JupiterResearch, lauds e-mail service providers for their efforts to give feedback to ISPs in order to improve the e-mail delivery process, and notes that this will “create better opportunities for e-mail marketing, although marketers will have to work harder to remain relevant in their communications with their intended audiences.”

This lends further evidence to support e-mail marketing’s steady and important value.

Sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS105540+07-Jan-2008+BW20080107

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/01/07/email-marketing-spending-to-hit-21-billion

Strong Spend Ahead for E-Mail Marketing

JANUARY 8, 2008

But the tactic's humble rep could be hurting it.

E-mail marketing spending will grow to $2.1 billion in 2012 from $1.2 billion in 2007, according to JupiterResearch's "US E-mail Marketing Forecast, 2007 to 2012" report. “E-mail service providers have done a solid job of standardizing feedback loops with Internet service providers and are continuing to make needed improvements in e-mail delivery,” said David Daniels, vice president and research director at JupiterResearch.

“This will create better opportunities for e-mail marketing, although marketers will have to work harder to remain relevant in their communications with their intended audiences,” Mr. Daniels said.

JupiterResearch also said that spending on retention e-mail would more than double through 2012 and account for more than half of total e-mail marketing spending by then.

Acquisition e-mail marketing was pegged to grow more slowly, with sponsorships such as ad-supported newsletters accounting for most spending.

In its own calculations of e-mail marketing spending, eMarketer includes payments to e-mail service providers, list rental and the costs of in-house e-mail. eMarketer projects that e-mail marketing spending will creep up steadily, reaching $1.65 billion by 2011.

"E-mail marketing is effective, but spending is tempered by the somewhat but not entirely valid impression among many companies that e-mail is inexpensive marketing and that they therefore need not throw too much money at those programs," said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.

Spending on e-mail marketing is also moderated by its own efficiency. Because e-mail is a low-cost medium, even relatively large increases in the number of commercial e-mails are not reflected in large spending increases.

Spending will jump by 5.1% in 2008, supported by marketing for both the national and local elections. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, marketing spending growth in 2010 will be boosted by election activity.

"US e-mail marketing spending in 2007 will reach nearly $1.5 billion," Mr. Hallerman said. "That is about $3.60 for e-mail marketing for every $1 that goes to e-mail advertising.

E-mail use to increase in 2008: Datran Media

Marketers plan to increase e-mail use in 2008, according to a new study by online marketing services firm Datran Media.

Overall, 72% of the marketers surveyed indicated that they plan to use e-mail marketing more in 2008.

The survey, which included 1,500 marketing professionals, focused on marketers' plans to use e-mail marketing in 2008. Firms included KPMG International, InfoUSA, QInteractive and Art.com.

It found that 70.5% reported plans to increase spending on e-mail acquisition and 63% to increase spending on retention campaigns.

In addition, 83% of respondents expect e-mail ROI to increase during the New Year. E-mail optimization techniques, including landing pages, subject line testing and triggered messaging, were unanimously ranked as "very important."

The survey also found that more than half of the respondents outsourced e-mail marketing.

Getting More Mileage from E-Mail Metrics

NOVEMBER 26, 2007

Short-term focus, long-term results.

Nearly all e-mail marketers measure their campaigns, but many do not use the results to support their budgeting goals, according to EmailStatCenter.com's "State of Email Metrics" survey, sponsored by Campaigner.

More than one-half of respondents said they measured results 24 to 48 hours after deployment. However, fewer than one-fifth said they measured their annual results. “Marketers must continually evaluate and benchmark their campaigns, in addition to looking at them immediately after the send,” said Luc Vezina, vice president of marketing at Campaigner, in a statement.

Although e-mail campaigns were usually measured for success, only one-half of e-mail marketers said they used the metrics for budgeting or forecasting.

Respondents had a range of e-mail marketing budget amounts, but the greatest number of marketers (31.7%) budgeted less than $50,000 annually. More than one-fifth did not know their budgets.

In 2007, more online marketers planned to increase their budgets for in-house e-mail lists than for any other online ad tactic except for search marketing, according to MarketingSherpa.

The numbers suggest that customer retention took priority over acquisition, as only 10% of respondents said they planned to spend more for e-mail to third-party lists.

Microsoft selects Datran Media for e-mail marketing services

By Dianna Dilworth

September 17th, 2007

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Technology giant Microsoft has selected Datran Media to deliver its e-mail marketing communications worldwide.

Microsoft will be employing Datran’s StormPost platform, which lets the technology firm customize its communications. Microsoft can use the platform across its communications but is starting with opt-in Hotmail-featured offers and newsletters.

“This really adds a lot of new opportunities to their sending potential, since Storm Post helps with targeting, deliverability and compliance,” said Josh Baer, chief technology officer at Datran Media, New York.

In collaboration with Microsoft, Datran Media also developed an e-mail inventory management system that lets Microsoft’s advertising sales staff keep track of sold and available e-mail media inventory, similar to banner inventory management. When inventory goes unsold, it can then be released into the entire market place exchange.

“It is specifically designed so that their sales force can sell segments within that message, which optimizes what they sell and how unsold inventory is released,” said Matt Keiser, co-founder and president of Datran Media.

Microsoft can also segment its list and sell e-mail inventory based on different segmented audiences.

This platform will now be available for all Datran clients.

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s technology team accepted the StormPost .NET-based platform, a collaboration of the two companies, as a component of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.

How Big Is The Market Again?

by Bill McCloskey, Wednesday, Sep 12, 2007 2:00 AM ET

WELL, I HAVE AN UNOFFICIAL number for you. The email marketing industry is a $3 billion industry in the U.S. in 2007. It is significantly higher than that in Europe.

How did I come up with this number, you might ask? From aggregating a number of sources from various experts. In particular, I want to thank all the folks on the Inbox Insiders list who provided much of the insight this number is based on. But you can decide for yourself if my numbers hold water or not. Here is my reasoning:

First, we have a couple of trade sources to go by. The Interactive Advertising Bureau reports that the email marketing industry was $250 million for 2005 and $338 million for 2006, or 2% of the overall online advertising spend. So let's put it at $456 million for 2007, based on the assumption that interactive marketing grew at the same pace from 2006 to 2007. The IAB, since it's a publishing-centric trade organization, only includes banner ads, text links, sponsorships, and the like in its number. In other words: these numbers quantify how much publishers made from email marketing.

But there are a whole lot of other people in the equation: services and tools are not included, as well as the money pumped out by lead-generation emails. Forrester Research puts the email marketing industry at 1.6 billion for 2007 (and this is a number first mentioned in 2005). This number includes things like service providers and agencies but does not include lead-gen revenue. According to my inside sources, the Forrester folks also think this figure is low, and will increase it in some upcoming numbers they are running now.

So that would put the advertising revenue at $456 million, and technology and services at $1.15 billion. That would seem to make sense, based on Ed (formally of Yesmail and now at Responsys) Henrich's estimate that the top seven enterprise-focused ESPs had a combined revenue of around $480 million.

But as Des Cahill, CEO of Habeas, points out: "Also add to this, from the IAB '06 data, a portion of the 8% of $16.9 billion lead generation slice of online ad revenue (or $1.35 billion) which is powered by email. Now we're starting to get some big numbers that more accurately represent email's value to online marketing."

So we have: $456 million for email-generated advertising revenue, $1.15 billion for all the technology, agency, consultant, service providers out there, and $1.35 billion for the lead-gen portion.

Add it together, and you have $2.9 billion--which we already know is probably low because of the Forrester numbers being low, so let's round it up to $3 billion.

Hey, it sounds like a good industry to invest in!

But what is missing: The value of email. None of these numbers include the revenue generated to companies as a result of more traffic being driven to the Web site. How much bottom line profits are being added to companies each year as a direct result of their paying that $3 billion bill for all the sponsorships, distribution, analysts and lead gen they bought. As Des says: "What percent of the $170 billion in U.S. '06 online commerce [source: comScore 10/06] was driven through email (how much Web site traffic driven by email)?"

Sounds like a job for the EEC!

Brand Marketers Use Direct Methods

JUNE 6, 2007

Direct metrics tempt the purest of branders.

Brand and mass marketers are now using direct techniques in their campaigns, according to the Direct Marketing Association's "The Integration of DM and Brand" report.

More than half (56%) of respondents to the DMA survey used one or more direct marketing channels in conjunction with their brand awareness advertising. Specifically, 50% used Web marketing with direct response mechanisms included, 48% used trackable offers and 45% used call-to-action on Web pages.

E-mail in particular is used with a range of direct marketing tactics. For example, 52% of respondents used call-to-action in their e-mails, 50% used targeting and 47% used trackable offers and response mechanisms.

Respondents said nearly two-thirds of their marketing budgets were allocated to direct marketing, and 36% toward mass marketing.

Search marketers were especially keen on direct techniques. Search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) were used with response mechanisms by 28% of respondents, while 31% used SEO with targeting and a quarter used search engine data for list building.

"We began this report with the hypothesis that brand and direct marketers would differ substantially in their responses," Peter Johnson of the DMA said. "But when we analyzed the data, we discovered that, for those marketers with more experience, the differences have faded away. Marketing experts are combining direct techniques into brand advertising — and in all media, too."

Eugenia Steingold of the DMA added, "The findings of our latest report show that direct marketing tactics designed to increase consumer awareness and action are ubiquitous — from URLs on all marketing materials, to 800 numbers, to calls-to-action in TV, radio and print ads — and across every other type of marketing media."

The results of the domestic DMA study echo those of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization's worldwide survey conducted in December 2006. That study asked about core metrics used to measure search engine marketing effectiveness.

Nearly all the metrics mentioned linked to various direct response goals, except for brand impact, which was cited by only 21% of respondents.

Over half of search engine advertisers in the same survey said brand awareness was a top goal.

However, eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman noted, "The effectiveness of search marketing for branding is not as readily measured as direct sales or lead generation. Furthermore, a brand is often promoted by the same techniques that can be counted by direct response metrics such as site traffic."