subject: Which Email Marketing Strategies Have The Highest Conversions [print this page] Marketing Sherpa, the marketing research group, has recently completed an excellent analysis of the return experienced versus the work required for a number of email strategies.
Marketing Sherpa looked at three indicators:
- Level of usage
- Level of effort
- Level of effectiveness
for the following email tactics:
- Ads in third party newsletters
- Sharing email on social networks
- Email to rented lists
- Event triggered autoresponder emails
- Email to house lists
- Delivering content to relevant segments
And related the two factors to level of usage.
The results show make some clear distinctions between what is worth doing and what may not be worth doing.
Ads in third party newsletters
This tactic is listed as requiring very little effort but being less than ten percent effective.
Accordingly, most marketers do not waste much time on this tactic. This result seems to suggest that when you target someone by email, you need to be providing worthwhile content in order for that contact to be useful. Ads would not necessarily be seen as useful, particularly since the receiver opted into getting info from the newsletter producer, not the ad producer.
Sharing email on social networks
Sharing email on social networks takes a bit more effort to perform, probably because most companies have not organized their social marketing tasks using an application that allows them to do simultaneous updates. This tactic also scores quite poorly in terms of effectiveness and is not frequently used for that reason. Marketers accordingly use this tactic least frequently.
It is probably predictable that sending to a list of people who have not specifically opted in for information is not effective. One of the keys to effective email campaigns seems to be the necessity of the receiver having an already established interest in receiving the material.
Email to rented lists
This tactic has an extremely poor effectiveness showing and actually takes a bit more effort than either ads in third party newsletters or sharing emails on social networks.
Event triggered autoresponder email
This tactic includes emails sent after a purchase or in response to a site visit. This method requires some setup time but much less ongoing effort to implement than the tactic of delivering relevant content. It is also about half as effective.
It is interesting that this tactic is seen as only about thirty percent effective given that it is triggered as a response to a consumer action. The message may be that customers act in their own time, not in response to the sellers strategy.
Email to house list
Email to a house list takes the same amount of time as creating and sending autoresponders but it is twice as effective, underscoring the finding that email works best when people agree to receive it.
Delivering content to relevant segments
This tactic is the most sophisticated marketing technique. Customized content is created for your opt in list based on specific interests or demographic categories or purchasing history. Naturally, this technique is the most labor intensive, requiring fifty percent of marketers efforts but ranks as most effective at seventy percent.
Marketers report that they focus over eighty percent of their email strategy effort to generic and customized emails to in house lists. The messages to take from this survey are:
- People respond to emails that they have chosen to receive
- The more customized to recipient interests, the more effective.
Use this information to prioritize your company's email efforts.
