Effectiveness of Email Marketing

What Lets You Down: Pit Falls of Email Marketing Everyone is aware of how email marketing has managed to make its place as an integral component on virtual marketing campaigns. Almost 90 percent of companies, as of survey conducted in 2011, have deployed email marketing as a primary tool in their campaigns. However there are still things people don’t know about email marketing and it is this ignorance which leads to rather unexpected results.

Marketing agencies and even marketing professionals working for in-house marketing departments of organizations must invest time and resources to conduct adequate research and appropriate training on how to run an email marketing campaign. They must particularly stick to the rules and regulations highlighted in the CAN-SPAM Act. As the name suggests the act is designed to enforce penalties on those marketers who use false information or otherwise spamming techniques in their email marketing campaigns.

One would reckon email marketing is just as simple as pressing the send button and waiting for the sales to come in. it is easier said than done, one would be considered terribly wrong if he sticks to this perception. Inexperienced marketers seem to underestimate the magnitude of the damage an unplanned and casually tested email campaign can turn in.

The above mentioned Act restricts use of false information, identity, misleading or deceptive subject lines. It also promotes clear communication as emails dispatched for the purpose of advertisement must clearly mention it to be an advertisement. Similarly your email marketing campaigns must give the viewer a privilege to select whether he/she wants to receive the email in future or not, this is known as opt-out clause.

In 2011 email marketing campaigns which were of no impact had not taken these guidelines seriously, some of the campaigners did not even know that such Act exists. Those who were able to successfully land their emails to their desired recipients, later faced another issues, almost 50% of the recipients had unsubscribed from the senders list just because they were getting too many emails which were mostly irrelevant. This shows how important it is for companies to carefully select your target audience and maintain relevance between their needs and the content they communicate. You might not realize it, but such campaigns get very irritating, irritating enough to make 22% of customers boycott the company product.

Another less understood pitfall of email campaign is the bounce back rate. Usually the acceptable bounce back rate is between 1-2%. However companies having a greater bounce back rate must make sure that they don’t waste their efforts and update their database, as soon as possible. Otherwise this will result in company’s efforts being wasted and emails being dispatched to abandoned email addressed or fake accounts. Remember an email that never reaches the inbox has no worth, you can never expect to gain fruitful results from email campaigns which make their way to the spam folder or no folder at all.

Reference: http://www.researchomatic.com/proposalevaluating-the-effectiveness-of-email-marketing143920.html