The Email Wars

This is a great report that came out of Jupiter Research. They have found in a study that targeted email campaigns have a greater affect on the overall marketing effort than most other forms of marketing. Here is the catch from my perspective, campaigns cannot use the shotgun approach to marketing. This means that stop sending the same emails to everyone assuming that everyone reacts to the same call to action. Study your lists, responses and behavoirs and start sending smaller drops to targeted prospects and customers. Look for patterns in larger email drops to focus on people that use a certain link or user paths end at a product or service on the web site. Then drop a focused email with limited options to interact with. From that second touch, drop and even more focused email to those that respond but don’t convert. And keep creating silos that can start predicting what your prospect or customer wants from you.

Marketing is one to one. Not one to many. Use this to win the war.

JupiterResearch Finds Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns Can Generate Nine Times More Revenue Than Broadcast Mailinings

JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation(Nasdaq: JUPM), released the report entitled, “The ROI of EmailRelevance: Improving Campaign Results Through Targeting,” whichquantifies the top and bottom line impact that targeted marketingtactics can have on email campaign performance. According to thereport, using Web analytics to target email campaigns can produce ninetimes the revenues and eighteen times the profits of broadcastmailings.

“Spam and the cluttered inbox have not killed the email medium formarketers,” said David Daniels, research director at JupiterResearch.”With a clear messaging strategy that is built off of a lifecyclerelationship driven approach, there is still tremendous value that canbe derived from email,” added Daniels.

To date, however, few marketers are sending highly contextuallytargeted email campaigns; most are utilizing broadcast and basicpersonalization tactics that do little to make these marketingmessages highly relevant. According to Daniels, “the failure of CRMsystems to centralize all customer insights haunts email marketing andin many respects relegates it to a second class medium. Because thelack of integrated customer data is the top challenge for largemarketers, these data deficiencies bind many of them to relativelysimplistic targeting tactics.”

The JupiterResearch report also addresses the following emergingtrends and tactics that marketers should begin to incorporate to theirpractices:

– When asked about promotional email’s influence on their purchasing decisions, 60% of consumers who made immediate purchases from email did so because the email contained products they were already considering, underscoring the need to catch the customer at the right time with the correct offer.

– Adopting a lifecycle approach requires additional up-front work and ongoing creative development, but these repeatable campaigns can be set up once and then largely leveraged with little or no impact on staffing.

– Marketers must be realistic in setting performance goals because many targeted campaigns (e.g., life cycle, clickstream) require not only data integration, but also the appropriate amount of data for a meaningful segment of customers.

– The proliferation of integrated email marketing and Web analytics tools will drive Web analytics growth and fuel ESP (Email Service Provider) consolidation.