E-mail marketers are faced with a choice in this tough market: Either continue current sub-standard, but familiar, business practices or find a way to take advantage of the circumstances and thrive. Now is the time to abandon the fixation with the cost of sending an e-mail, the reliance on both gut hunches and conventional wisdom, and the view that e-mail marketers have nothing to learn from the rest of the business world. Shifting from focusing on cost to ROI will enable the other changes to flourish.
E-mail marketers have in the past gotten by with poor business practices because e-mail is a cheap channel that often isn’t central to the company’s main marketing focus. Compared to offline programs, it is relatively easy to make money with e-mail.
In building and presenting your ROI model, you need to take into account the real costs of e-mail, which are customer opt-outs, spam complaints and junking; decreased brand value; and lower deliverability. Statistically, simply blasting out e-mails results in more customers opting out. People who aren’t interested in hearing from you are not going to magically become excited if they are barraged with e-mail.
Lower delivery, in turn, impacts your bottom line now and in the future. Additionally, the full revenue impact of e-mail marketing needs to be incorporated into the ROI model. E-mail marketers, consequently, need to incorporate customer data from all channels into their e-mail campaign analytics. Sometimes it is necessary to look at statistical trends or conduct specific campaign tests to detect the impact.
Taking an ROI and profit and loss approach also enables e-mail marketers to increase their perceived value to the organization. Multichannel customers are, on average, worth significantly more than single-channel customers. As a result, companies are starting to look for ways to optimize business across channels. E-mail is a superhighway that can move customers between channels to satisfy both the needs of the customer and of the company.
