Best Practices In Strategic Email Marketing December 2005

Research
Relevance & ROI

One of the most interesting research reports of 2005 was from JupiterResearch, entitled ROI of Email Relevance: Improving Campaign Results Through Targeting. The report quantifies the top and bottom line impact that targeted marketing tactics can have on email campaign performance. It found that using analytics to target email campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and eighteen times the profits of broadcast mailings.

Unfortunately, another finding was that few marketers are sending highly contextually targeted email campaigns. The majority still use broadcast and basic personalization tactics that do little to add relevance, and the culprit is a lack of integrated customer data that restricts marketers to simplistic targeting tactics.

Other interesting findings in the report:

  • 60% of consumers who made immediate purchases from email did so because the email contained products they were already considering.

  • Only a third of offer-oriented marketers focus on relevance.
Relevance requires adopting a lifecycle approach which requires additional up-front work and ongoing creative development. This might sound like a tall order to the typical overworked and understaffed marketing department. But once in place, these repeatable campaigns can be set up once and leveraged with little or no impact on staffing.