Posts tagged email
Why email marketing is on the rise
Mar 21st
The conversion rates of marketing email campaigns increased by more than 11% in the fourth quarter of last year, and by more than 16% throughout 2010, according to a new study sponsored by Epsilon.
The “Q4 2010 Email Trends and Benchmarks” report reveals that the open rates of marketing emails improved by 5% in the last two years, with four of 13 industries recording an increase over their 2009 numbers.
Click rates remained static over the last two years, but dropped from 5.9% to 5.1% in the past 12 months alone.
The non-bounce back rate experienced a small jump from 93.9% to 95% over the past year, while the average volume per client rose 18.5% in the same period.
Will the rise of technology in marketing practices marketers have come to realise that in order to stand out, they have to get their messages right.
And now that email marketing has matured, the number of businesses embracing email marketing looks set to increase over the coming 12 months, according to Circle Research’s B2B Barometer.
It found that email marketing investment will increase as more companies gravitate towards online advertising.
The firm reported that 14% of budgets are expected to be put towards email marketing campaigns during the course of 2011.
And 38% of survey respondents said they had advanced management systems in place to support successful email marketing campaigns.
The report indicated that email marketing use will increase as businesses are “heavily focused towards attracting and retaining customers”.
According to the European Interactive Advertising Association, the flexibility and agility of email marketing messages contributes to the success of the channel. The channel can offer excellent return on investment.
Email versus Social media. What’s more effective?
Oct 22nd
Three-quarters of web users say they are likely to share pieces of content with their friends and family, an activity brands are watching closely in their attempts to leverage the influence of brand advocates, according to eMarketer.
A new study from SocialTwist has revealed email was the most common channel used to share content via the company’s Tell-a-Friend widget, accounting for more than half of all referrals. Social networks made up fewer than a quarter of shares.
But shares on social networks had outsize importance in terms of clicks: 60% of clicks generated on shared items came from social networks, compared with just 31% from email.
One reason for the imbalance is the high clickthrough rates for shared content on social sites, says the researcher.
Links posted to Facebook via the Tell-a-Friend widget generated an average of 2.87 clicks each. Twitter shares did even better, with an average of 19.04 users clicking each referral link.
But email may be performing better than it seems at first glance.
Emails sent through the Tell-a-Friend widget include the full piece of content in the message, so users don’t need to click through to the original site to read the item that a friend thought was interesting enough to send. Facebook and Twitter users, by contrast, must click through to read more than a blurb.
For many sources of content, the clickthrough is key: When visitors click through to the originating site it opens up the possibility of ad revenues as well as the ability to build awareness and purchase intent while the user is on an owned-media property. But email recipients who read the content shared without clicking through will still get the benefit of an earned-media recommendation.
Brands should ensure that shareable content carries a message on its own that will remain effective when read through an email client, since such messages remain the primary sharing vehicle for consumers.
Earlier research similarly showed that email shares had a lower click rate than items sent through Twitter or Facebook, but email shares led to more engagement, including more pages viewed and, most important, more conversions.
Are you making the most out of email?
Jun 28th
More than 270 billion emails are sent around the world everyday, yet one email company believes we’re still not taking full advantage of the medium.
Can email get any better? Jason Roberts, founder and managing director of LiveLinkConnect thinks it can.
He says that “Email is so 90s” and that we’re taking the medium for granted. “Email needs to come of age,” he told New Zealand’s Stuff.co.nz.
As a marketer, he thinks we can do a lot more with email by making it a richer experience. I really believe email needs to come of age.”
By “come of age”, Roberts means that email users should be able to send mail full of rich multimedia content from their usual email client, and know in real time when the recipient opens it.
Roberts also believes that there is an element of retraining, or changing our perceptions of email, in what he is attempting.
He’s on a crusade to make the kind of tools used in mass email campaigns available, not only to companies, but to individual users.
The principles behind these email products are simplicity, speed and efficiency, and interactivity. The problem with email is that it is a passive communication channel in many ways, he says, while the advent of Web 2.0 and social media is turning us into digital chattering classes.
At the moment, email is a good tool for delivery and a poor way to connect.
But will the everdya email user really need all these ‘add-on’ when many of us are already switching to social media sites such as Facebook to send various messages?
With Facebook, for example, users can share links, videos, pictures, etc. Pretty much exactly what LiveLinkConnect is offering but with email. I just wonder if there is a use for it. But then again, if it is free, then why not.
How to target men using fashionable technology
Feb 23rd
What’s the best way to market the latest technology? Make it look fashionable of course.
The excitement of Apple’s new iPad set many hearts a-flutter. Financially, it is predicted to be another Apple money spinner.
Industry analysts Gartner Research expect the iPad to inject rocket fuel into the sleepy tablet PC market once it actually goes on sale at the end of March, boosting tablet sales from 1 to 9 million by the end of the year.
But how many so-called gadget fans are really in it for the technology? Are some more concerned with image over function, perhaps ageing Baby Boomers wanting trendy gadgets to stave off looking middle aged?
A survey of over 500 users by global news website OneNewsPage asked if some gadgets such as iPhones and Playstations look inappropriate in the hands of older consumers.
It’s worth noting that most who took part in OneNewsPage’s survey were strongly into their technology.
Forty four per cent of respondents claimed they ‘always’ buy the latest gadgets as soon as they go on sale.
But it was a close contest on the question of age. Fifty two per cent agreed that keeping up with latest gadgets is a sign of desperation, while 48% disagreed.
Over half (55%) felt gadgets were like clothes, and consumers needed to buy the right ones for their age.
Indeed, 63% felt that once a person turns 40, no gadget is ever going to make them look ‘cool’.
The survey found that 44% agreed with the statement that people over 40 on a Playstation was “plain wrong”. And 40% felt similarly about the over 40s using iPhones.
Meanwhile, research from Microsoft Advertising has laid bare the depth of British men’s love affair with technology.
The report, entitled ‘PFM Unplugged’, reveals that the UK’s Pre-Family Men (PFM) – young males who have completed their education but not yet started a family – are heavily engaged in technology and always online.
PFM are interacting with technology in some way during every waking hour (anyone who has a boyfriend knows that). They are the first generation to have grown up with the internet, and with the majority (99%) claiming to go online either every day or nearly every day and half using their mobile phones to do so.
The research shows that they are increasingly reliant on the Internet for entertainment, information and communication, with 80% going so far as to state that they would be lost without it.
In fact, the internet is the technology 57% of PFM are most attached to, closely followed by mobile phones (49%) and TV (46%).
PFM are apparently never ‘doing nothing’, and even downtime is filled by some activity, more often than not facilitated by technology. It’s also often also the first thing they think about when they wake up with a quarter of PFM admitting to checking their email and 18% looking at social networking sites on their mobile phone before they get out of bed in the morning.
Despite the popularity of social networks and the perception that traditional social email is dying, email remains the most valued online tool amongst PFM, with 52% of respondents rating it above all others (compared with 25% for search and 12% for social networking sites) and 87% stating their use of email had stayed the same or increased over the last year. 94% use email at least once per day, compared with 60% that go on to a social network.
Technology is fuelling the blurring of work and play as modes of behaviour overlap. While 43% of the men surveyed admitted occasionally browsing the internet during afternoons at work, PFM is also checking his work email in the evenings, on his way to and from work and before he gets out of bed in the morning.
Online video content is an important source of entertainment for PFM and it’s no longer just limited to short clips- 73% of PFMs will watch video-on-demand (VOD) at least once a week with nearly half watching full length TV programs. Catching up on TV shows they’ve missed and watching archive shows were the main drivers to viewing online and the majority (59%) viewed on a laptop.
The ‘PFM Unplugged’ report from Microsoft Advertising also provides advertisers with a series of recommendations on how they may reach and engage with PFM based on the insights uncovered in the research. You can download it here.
Recession-busting efficiency for your marketing
Dec 21st
When time and money are in short supply, efficiency is the name of the game, and nothing has done more to increase marketing efficiency than the internet. These are the top 3 technologies that I have found most effective in getting more bangs out of the marketing budget – and why.
1) Web Analytics
With some investment in the initial setup, it’s amazing what you can learn from web analytics – and how much wastage you can eliminate. The best free service is Google Analytics. It can tell you how much interest you get from each marketing campaign, how many sales, and how much revenue. With Google Analytics I managed to halve our spend on pay per click advertising, and improve results from other types of marketing as well.
2) Email
Using email, it is as quick and almost as cheap to reach 10,000 prospects as 100. Email is highly scalable; and because the call to action can be as simple as clicking a link, response rates are significantly higher than with direct mail or print advertising, and more immediate. It’s also very easy to incentivise a response by using a special offer that is triggered simply by clicking a link in the email.
3) XML Feeds
Publishing data in XML (or ‘RSS’) format enables you to multiply the delivery at no extra cost. You can display the same information automatically on your web site, on social networking sites like Facebook, and even on Twitter. You can submit it to Google Base, ensuring that it gets spidered by Google and any links in it get indexed. And you can publish it using services like AddThis and Feedburner, so that clients and prospects can follow it via their news readers or personal home pages.
What are your top efficiency-inducing technologies?
Bruce Townsend, online marketing expert at ecommerce & EPOS supplier, Actinic
Email versus Twitter – which has the best conversion rates?
Dec 17th
Email will not be defunct in 10 years, but either will social networks
Email generates 86% of all online sharing activity, making it the preferred consumer sharing method by far, while Facebook and Twitter are the next most preferred channels for sharing, but only represent a fraction of all activity.
So, that little statistic counters the mountains of research that has surfaced this year declaring that email marketing has been replaced by social networks.
Benchmark data from millions of sharing activities on the StrongMail Influencer platform has identified email and blogs as most effective social channels for direct marketing conversions.
Sharing online content via email generates the highest conversion rates, while Twitter is the most effective channel for extending reach, according to the December 2009 “Social Influence Benchmark Report “, released today.
However, according to Q3 2009 data, while email dominates the sharing activity, each email shared by an influencer only generates 0.41 additional clicks.
Conversely, sharing via Twitter generates more than 18 clicks per post, which translates into a 1,837% click-through rate versus 41% for email.
This impressive click-through rate firmly establishes Twitter as the most effective channel for amplifying a marketer’s program across the social web.
Peer-to-peer emails generate a 36.8% conversion rate, compared to just 3% for Facebook. Conversions from Twitter programs remain very low, but trends within the data suggest growth in Q4 2009.
Embedded links for sharing via web pages and blogs turned in the second highest conversion percentage at 20.5%.
Read more here.
Will email be defunct in 10 years?
Nov 19th
The jury is out on the future of email, according to new research from TalkTalk, in collaboration with the University of Kent.
The research found that email could become obsolete in 10 years, replaced by instant messaging and social network sites.
These sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and MySapce, are seen as more fashionable and faster and easier to use, plus they can be accessed from anywhere with mobile phone technology.
Although 15 to 24-year-olds do use email, they use instant messaging and social networking sites more often, according to the research, and on the flip side, older generations are more reliant on email and don’t find it as easy to shift to using the latest communication technology.
OneNewsPage.com asked its users to respond to the following question:
‘Will email be defunct in 10 years?’
The respondents were evenly divided. Fifty per cent agreed it would be defunct, the other half disagreed.
The survey was conducted by OneNewsPage.com over two days. The question was displayed on www.onenewspage.com 57, 604 times, and 240 people answered the poll.
But despite the results, I have to say that I do not think that email will ever be ‘defunct’. How would businesses run without email? Haven’t the advent of smartphones proved how much we rely on email – always having it with us?
Email will never die. Dan Grabham from TechRadar magazine agrees. He told Sky News, “Email won’t completely die off – it’ll probably still be used for some important purposes such as sending crucial files to someone particular.
“But it’s clear that for quick, direct communication Twitter and other social systems are easier to use and can garner a far quicker response – not least because inboxes continue to fill up with unstoppable junk.”
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