Getting better results from your Email Marketing

The advent of email marketing has given a serious lift to direct response marketing world-wide.

For the first time, even small companies, start-ups and others on tight budgets can find out what sales & marketing approaches really work for them.

That's because email marketing – provided it's carried out in a methodologically rigorous and strategic fashion – can be a veritable goldmine of hard data on what works, and doesn't work, for marketers. Companies are able to test their promotional offerings quickly, cost-effectively – and in a statistically valid fashion.

Why, then, do so many companies not achieve the hoped-for results?

Ironically, email marketing's inherent principal advantages – relative cost-efficiency, easy set-up and quick execution – are often the very reasons why company marketing departments fail to maximise its potential.

Often, what happens is this: an email 'blast' is sent out in an ad-hoc or reactive fashion, typically because of short-term pressures to 'get the revenue in now' in order to meet a quarterly budgetary requirement in a company's financial calendar.

The results: insufficient attention paid to such critical variables as from and subject lines, copy length, email architecture, release timings, calls to action, offers and link copy.

While the short-term cash call may be met, email marketing then gets treated as a tactical medium – a way of making quick money, with relatively little effort and at relatively short notice.

But because these companies are not consciously testing each email effort, they miss out on the opportunity to find out what really works best in their market – then monetise that knowledge in subsequent email campaigns.

And here's the sting in the tail: over time, there develops a widening 'revenue gap' between what the company should be achieving, and what it actually brings in.

So each time these companies send out another email they're losing money that should be theirs for the taking.

Want better results from your email marketing campaigns? Then contact us today.