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Is email still effective?

Email continues to be effective, to a degree. A few years ago Merrill Lynch, Intel and a few other well known companies met to discuss technology in the workplace. One company reported that their employees received on average 350 emails per week. That’s a lot of emails that need managing. At 5 minutes a piece, 350 emails consume 1,750 minutes or 29 hrs of productive time. We’d hazard a guess that the large majority were not relevant to the recipient but they still need to be read and responded to, or put aside to be dealt with later… though ‘later’ often never happens.

Today, email volume continues to grow. It’s a cheap medium to communicate your message and relatively quick and easy to create and distribute. The question to ask is how effective is it? Are you inundating your customers and turning them off? Are your subscribers deleting your emails or marking them as spam instead of unsubscribing?

Open rates are one thing, but tracking ‘action’ is more relevant. What did they do with the email? Did they bring it in to the store to redeem an offer or discount? Did they visit a link and download product assets?

And the biggest question to ask yourself is how effective is how well is it working for you? What’s the ROI? Did it bring in more sales than the cost of the campaign? Can an increase in sales be attributed to your email efforts or another activity? Could this tactical effort be enhanced by adding another marketing vehicle? Have you tested your email messaging for effectiveness? In short, as with all marketing tactics, testing and analysis of your activities along the way is vitally important so that you arrive at a ‘control’ for all campaign elements.

Curious as to whether you’re getting the most out of your marketing dollars? Give us a call or drop us an email, we’d love to talk with you.