Project Cake » The Potential Behind eNewsletters

The Potential Behind eNewsletters – Part 1: Why

I’ve just finished working on a small project to send out a managed email campaign for a friend. He’d never contemplated using e-newsletters and an eMarketing plan before, so after a chat over a BBQ and some beers, I’d persuaded him to give it a try on his latest campaign.

The results provided a useful insight into the potential of e-newsletters and a targeted eMarketing plan. I’ll go through the results a bit later on, for now I just want to tell you some useful facts and insights I’ve learnt from emails and eMarketing.

Personally I think eMarketing and a consistent and professional eNewsletter campaign is a must have for online success. Not building and maintaining a newsletter is suicidal for businesses aiming to tap into the online potential.

Users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters as they feel more personal than websites. Newsletters feel personal because they arrive directly into an Inbox – so you have an ongoing and direct relationship with your customer. This is a great positive for a business as you can create a much stronger bond between the user and the company.

eMarketing can be complex, but it can also be very cost effective. This does depend on a range of factors, but once everything has been taken into consideration, research clearly shows that large gains can be made. A newsletter is a principal pathway to building a long-lasting relationship with customers. It takes time to build up momentum though so patience is key, specific focus on campaigns and committing the message is essential.

A few years back (I can’t find the original report sorry) email newsletters ranked number 3 of 12 behind TV and Print as most trustworthy and least annoying. I’m thinking the “least annoying” may have changed slightly due to the massive increase in SPAM in recent years, but this still highlights that you can break through the clutter with sales and new clients appearing when you credibly establish a professional newsletter and eMarketing plan.

It’s also interesting to note that email marketing was the number 1 advertising tactic for 2007, according to a February survey by Datran Media because of its ability to drive incremental revenue, a reason cited by 55.3% of respondent.

It is also interesting to note that eMarketing was cheapest in Cost Per Order [define] for 2007.

Online Marketing Mediums & Average Cost Per Order

Email >$7
Affiliate Programs $17.47
Paid Search $26.75
Banner Ads $71.89

Source: “State of Retailing Online 2007″ by Shop.org of the National Retail Foundation with Forrester Research, reported in Direct.

With this knowledge in mind, you can see why so many businesses are finding great success with a well defined and targeted email campaign.

Now that its clear emails can help drive your sales, here are a few interesting facts I’ve picked up from a whole range of case studies and articles:

Email newsletters are opened at a 60 to 70% rate, sometimes even higher
Newsletters must be designed to facilitate scanning:
- Only 23% of newsletters are read thoroughly
- 50% of newsletters are skimmed or read partly
- 27% are not even opened
5 times as many people read the headline as read the ad or letter
Emails with sales offerings produce results some 50% higher than standalone email
Complaint rates are virtually nil (if you get the right balance)
Users are very demanding with regards to subscribes and unsubscribes:
- New subscriptions should take no less than 1 minute for a newsletter that needs just an email address
- Even if additional info is needed, users should be able to subscribe to free newsletters in less than 2 minutes
- Unsubscribes should take less than 1 minute
Run an ad for a week and response rates drop dramatically, sometimes up to 90%
A newsletter with 50,000 subscribers could add an estimated 14,000 subscribers on average if everybody could operate its subscription interface correctly