May
10
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Greetings from the Email Insider Summit in Bonita Springs, Florida. Great sun, nice breeze and wonderful networking.
At the opening reception tonight, I heard repeatedly from email marketers that the biggest challenge they wanted insight on this week was how to get past short-term thinking internally. Email channel revenue is the crack cocaine of direct marketing. Send out a bunch of emails and generate sales. Forget that we are churning the file and that 60%+ of subscribers are totally checked out. The predictable revenue hit is a very powerful force. And frankly, it's legit -- who can argue with revenue?
The answer is we can. I'm encouraged to hear ...
Categories: Response
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
There are so many marketing conferences that it can be tough to find time or budget to attend them all.
This is why I love that MarketingProfs is testing an ingenious idea - a virtual seminar! Check out their business-to-business conference that is completely online and completely free. What's better than that? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Apr
24
By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services
We've known for awhile now that email works. But it's still always nice to get a little data to affirm our passion for this channel.
So we were thrilled to see the release of a consumer survey from our friends at Epsilon. They found that an astonishing 84% of email recipients report clicking through on an email offer. The survey also found that 73% made an online purchase and 86% made an in-store purchase as the result of receiving a relevant email offer. In other words, when subscribers are happy, marketers will see tangible and impactful results. ...
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Apr
04
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
New research from Forrester reveals a trend we've been seeing for some time: Email recipients are an online retailer's best customers. In fact, Forrester found that people who buy products advertised in emails spend 138% more than those who don't buy through email. Email customers are also more likely to buy impulsively and are willing to pay premiums for convenience products.
These are your dream customers!
But wait ... it's not all wine and roses. The report also reveals just how tough the competition for inbox dominance has become. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Mar
21
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
About half (48%) of email subscribers make purchases or purchase decisions based on email messages, according to the recently released Jupiter Research survey of US Consumers (survey taken September 2006). Hooray! Email works! That's great news for all of us, and correlates with Return Path and client data I've seen: email subscribers are typically more active and valuable customers.
Sending email is not the same as engaging with subscribers, however. In the Jupiter Research, 45% of respondents said they were most interested in messages that are "personalized and targeted." Be honest - how many of the messages you sent this week were truly personalized and targeted? I was talking with a client this morning who voiced the familiar lament, "Why would someone who opted in to my program complain about my email to the ISP?" Well, the reason is ...
Categories: Response
Feb
26
By Chad Malchow
VP, New Business Development
When running reports on email metrics, marketers know to remove the bounces so that they are reporting only the response rates of the emails that were delivered. This method makes sense - an email that bounces can't possibly generate a response. Including the bounces would make your metrics look much worse than they really are.
So it's surprising to me that email marketers don't also remove the messages that don't make it to the inbox because of deliverability failures. These messages are no more capable of generating a response than your hard bounces, but get included in - and therefore depress - your metrics reports. This means that you are not taking the credit you deserve for the revenue your email is generating.
Let's look at an example to illustrate this point ...
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Feb
12
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Many marketers worry that consumers utilize the "this is spam" button indiscriminately - even gleefully - without appreciating the severe negative impact that a high complaint rate has on a sender's reputation and deliverability. Our Third Annual Holiday Survey offers some consolation - consumers seem to want to use the unsubscribe button more than they use the spam button.
According to our survey, consumers seem to trust the unsubscribe function, and to consider carefully the impact of a complaint (clicking the "this is spam" button). One third (33%) report that they are most likely to use the unsubscribe button first, and 12% say they use the complaint button "as the last resort" after trying other tactics. ...
Categories: Response
Feb
06
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
A telling trend emerged as we analyzed the results of our Third Annual Holiday Survey this year. While nearly all respondents still said they used email to make holiday shopping decisions, fewer respondents than last year reported using email for comparison shopping, gift ideas or even when visiting a store. We believe this is due to the normalizing of online shopping - email is no longer as necessary to encourage shoppers to go online. Shop.org reported in their 2006 eHoliday Mood Study that only 30% of consumers used email to shop online this year - but that almost half (48%) did more of their shopping online this year than last. The biggest drop in utility was with comparison shopping (down 7%) and gift ideas (down 14%). This suggests that either fewer marketers included such content in their emails this year, or that what was sent was not valuable to subscribers. ...
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Jan
30
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Although every email marketer covets a large file, most of us don't know enough about the size, quality and engagement levels of our subscriber base. A recently released survey Return Path helped field and analyze through the Email Experience Council (eec) highlights a pretty wide gap in email marketing optimization, indicates a lack of understanding or resources around defining the value of an email address, and establishes a clear need for best practices around email valuation and list growth.
Readers of this blog can get the report for a 30% discount off the $39 purchase price when you use the code rtsc during checkout. (Members of the eec can download the survey free.)
Even without clearly defined guidelines for how much a marketer can pay to acquire a new subscriber (or how to optimize for higher ROI of the file), many marketers in this survey claim that building a large file is important to them. Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Jan
23
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Return Path has just released our Third Annual Holiday Email Consumer Survey. For the third year in a row, consumers tell us that they love the kind of email that helps them shop, gives them new ideas and comes when it was promised (and not more often).
The good news is that nearly all respondents selected at least one response indicating the importance of email to their online shopping this season. In fact, half (49.1%) claimed they took advantage of several email offers this year. But the bad news, at least for some marketers, is that half report receiving high volumes of "junk" email this year ("email from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me."), and one-third say marketers email them more frequently than promised.
What makes consumers open one email and not another? ...
Categories: Response
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