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Current Trends In Email Marketing - Page 4 of 6
A Hunter and Associates Review -
November 2002
1-SUMMARY
| 2-SPAM | 3-COMMERCE
| 4-PERMISSION EMAIL
5-WHAT PEOPLE THINK | 6-HOW
TO DO IT
PERMISSION EMAIL
Email marketing has rapidly evolved from a relatively unsophisticated
medium of mass promotion to a highly specialized medium used to drive revenue,
deepen customer relationships, and influence prospect behavior. It is - or can
be - instant communication, the entry costs are extremely cheap, and companies
can keep track of their users.
The concept of Permission Marketing, though drawn from
older roots, was introduced formally to the Internet in 1999 by Seth Godin. The
great success examples such as Amazon and Yahoo are premised on this concept,
that users actually want to be offered service, but according to their particular
tastes and needs, and *only* on those terms.
The Web is a study in what works and what doesn't work,
and to a great degree it is direct marketers themselves, in devising countless
tests of their impulse purchase model, who have discovered that permission marketing
yields results far superior to that certain blend of desperate cleverness and
trickery we've all seen in our postal mailboxes. So now the industry is convinced,
and the rush is on.
Permission email is profitable
The cost per thousand emails from a rented list can vary
from $5 to $400. Click-through responses also vary of course, DoubleClick cites
the industry-wide average for permission email as 7.5% for text-only format, and
10% for HTML format. These are phenomenal results, as email marketers have long
known.
Marketers are now experimenting with instant offers, segmenting
interest groups more minutely, and within smaller time ranges, driving traffic
back and forth between website and inbox. DoubleClick shows that consumers will
click-through at their convenience from emails, but purchase later, or even offline.
Measurement and tracking is therefore becoming much more granular also: the industry
is developing post-click conversion tracking for email, as well as cross-channel
analysis in order to fully assess the impact of their emails.
Email is the glue
Email is the thread running between the website and the
printed media and television and radio and now the cell phone and wireless devices.
Email drives purchases and activities in all these other channels. DoubleClick
found in its surveys that 68% of respondents have made purchases online after
receiving email. 59% after receiving email have then made purchases in physical
retail stores. 39% bought through a catalog after email marketing, 34% through
call centers, and 20% through postal mail. Emails are motivating consumers to
purchase both online and offline.
Europe is expected to surpass the US this holiday season
in ecommerce revenues, largely because European catalog merchants have gone further
with tying their printed media to their online service, and vice versa. People
are reading print catalogs, and buying online. Analysts caution not to abandon
any one medium over the other, but to use a creative mix of strategies.
Companies themselves haven't quite grasped yet this correspondence
between the different media. Enterprise culture still views websites as providers
of information or services, a means of placing orders and a way to enhance the
company profile. Customer care, data capture and customer relationship management
techniques are generally seen as secondary, rather than principal, functions.
Most companies actively collect basic contact details on their customers and prospects,
and more than half send direct mail to consumers whose data has been captured
online. But the concept of continuing the personalized service into the website
is only slowly taking hold. Research is finding that email response rates among
online companies still leaves a lot to be desired, for example, even after at
least two years of industry consultants decrying poor Web service.
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