Email marketing has an extremely high ROI compared to most other forms of advertising. A seven-to-one return on investment is considered standard for an advertising campaign. Email based advertising beats the seven-to-one ratio with a stunning forty-five-to-one, this according to data published by the DMA (Direct Marketers Association). In a study they published that examined email marketing’s returns in the past three years, the conclusion was that Email marketing campaigns have been generating an average ROI of over 45$ for every dollar spent.This stunning ROI has led many businesses to take a stab at doing some in-house email marketing using a wide range of unsuitable tools with outcomes that range from limited success to catastrophic failure.
Email marketing the amateur way
is playing “Email Russian roulette”
Many SMBs and NPOs are currently using their Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc, accounts for sending out their email campaigns.
Besides being an unwieldy method for sending out massive amounts of email this practice is akin to playing Russian roulette with your email box.
Why?
Because when you send out large amounts of email to groups of people inevitably some of these people will either purposefully, or inadvertently, mark your email as spam. When this happens enough times at the very least your email address will be blacklisted.
In more severe cases your domain may be blacklisted. This will effectively prevent you, and everyone else sharing your domain, to use email. In today’s world, where email is a primary form of communication for many people and businesses, this situation will have a devastating effect on both your reputation and your business.
Using an ESP is an excellent email reputation insurance policy
The entry level email marketing packages offered by most ESPs are very low-cost to run and maintain, and fit the needs of most SMBs perfectly. When weighed against the potential damage that blacklisting can cause your business it is well worth your cost to use an ESP just as a form of email “insurance policy”. The low monthly fee that most services charge is money well spent when weighed against the catastrophic damage that getting blacklisted can cause you.
Monitor your email campaign’s effectiveness
One of the most fundamental rules of marketing is “Information = Power”. The more you know about your market and clientele the more power is at your disposal to market to them effectively. The Internet as a whole and email in particular allow you to know more about your clientele then was ever possible before. When you use an ESP to deliver your email marketing campaigns you will have data at your fingertips that you were never aware of before. Most mass email service providers can tell you what are the opening rates for your email campaigns, how many times your message was forwarded by the recipients, what links were clicked within the email and how many times and for what reason your email bounced. When collected and monitored over time this data will help you generate ever more effective messages and tip the ROI scales more and more in your favor.
Email list building and management for effect
The best way to capitalize on the high ROI’s that email marketing generates is to effectively build and manage your email mailing list. Most ESPs include powerful list creation and management tools that allow you to effectively segment your email list into sets and subsets according to demographic information and response rates.
The better you manage your list, the more exact your segmentation, and the more you focus your messages specifically to each segment, the higher your ROI will be for each of your email marketing campaigns.
Making sure that what you see is what they get
The lack of any binding standard for email has unpleasant implications for most amateur email marketing campaigns. Although they look fine on the sender’s machine they will appear messy and jumbled at the recipients end. This is especially true if the email has many image components. Many email clients (gmail, yahoo, msn and the like) have “images off” as their default setting. The implication is that if the email is composed mostly of graphics then the recipient will be entirely unaware of its contents. Most ESPs help you avoid the pitfalls of creating garbled or illegible messages by offering you customizable templates that will render reasonably well on most email clients. Furthermore ESPs often allow you to create and send a plain text version of your email to send to recipients that are unable or unwilling to accept heavy graphic HTML emails. With more and more people reading their email on the move, from their PDAs and their cell-phones, rather then from their computers, text-only emails are becoming an ever more important component in the email marketing toolbox.
ESPs are to email what the postman is to mail
Finally, using ESPs is a good choice because email is their job.
A good ESP maintains relationships with all major email clients and monitors its listing status on a daily basis. For email clients that provide the service, the ESP will ensure it is “white-listed” with the email client, to ensure that mail sent via from its servers gets through. A Good ESP will guarantee that your message is getting out and is being received by your audience. And getting your message to the right audience on time is what effective advertising is all about…
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