Is Email Marketing Being Shortchanged?

Oct 14, 2009•Blog Posts•E-mail•Online & Digital Media• by author

Scott M.

Email marketing may not be getting all the credit it deserves. ROI numbers do not reflect the many aspects of email marketing that cannot be measured and thus, are going unaccounted for.

Take, for instance, a situation where a retailer sends out a weekly mass email to its subscribers announcing a 3-day, 60 percent off sale in the store – no coupons, just a sale announcement. The customer reads the email and, in turn, makes it a point to stop by the store before the end of the sale. This is great because it means that your email worked! Customers got the message through your email. But how do you know this for sure? Because you also have big “SALE” signs in the windows. Maybe the signs are what brought the customers in. The problem here is that there really is no way of tracking the number of customers that came in because of the email and the customers that came in because of the signs. The email could very well have brought in the majority of customers, but with no promotional code or other proof, the email ROI and response rate can appear much lower than it actually is.

A study by Epsilon discovered that a whopping 67 percent of email subscribers say that they have purchased products offline as a result of receiving an email from the retailer. This is a significant number that shows the effectiveness of email marketing that simply isn’t being measured.

Another opportunity to skew the ROI of email marketing comes when recipients visit the retailer’s website directly by entering the URL rather than clicking on the links provided in the email. Because a common measurement for email marketing is to track the number of recipients who click the links within the email, those who directly visit the site are being left out in the email reporting. The same study by Epsilon found that 33 percent of email subscribers say they generally go to websites directly, as opposed to following an email link.

Before letting email marketing fall out in the budget cuts, take into consideration some of the overlooked benefits and what they mean to your business.