I’m so sick of email marketing
It’s just not exciting any more. Six years ago, sure. I was eating it up. But now I want to do video and social networking and widgets. Unfortunately, there’s no denying it. Email works.
My colleague Arthur Cohen, director of audience development at RISI puts it this way,
“I get about at least 50 emails in my work inbox every morning. That’s less than some email stats indicate—75, or even 100. I bet your professional inbox is at least as cluttered. So what’s to love about this time sink? Nothing at all. But if I can craft a message that grabs you through that swamp and makes some big bucks for my company, I feel the love all right, you betcha. But wait—there’s more; if you’re good at your craft, it’s the best ROI in town. Come to think of it, what’s not to love?“
Arthur’s right of course. The last marketing campaign I ran included the following:
Flash Banners (x2) : 19,169 impressions : 0.16% CTR*
Video Banner : 14,248 impressions : 0.20% CTR
Google Ads : 364,934 : 0.03% CTR
email: 28,351 sent : 5,104 opens : 1,103 unique clicks : 21.61% CTR**
*Click through rate based on clicks/impressions. **Click through rate based on clicks/opens. I generally go by opens rather than sent because it’s a more equatable to a page impression.
This was a rush campaign that was put together in a couple of days and only ran for 2 weeks, so the overall results clearly aren’t stellar. But you can’t sneeze at the email number.
Another more long-term campaign I’m running has seen similar results. I’m promoting free subscriptions to the digital edition of my company’s magazine. The Google and banner ads slowly trickle in subscriptions. The print ads are harder to quantify, but at least they’re good for branding. Again, the email blasts are killing. Every time I send one out, I get another thousand subscriptions.
Over time, I will have exhausted my lists and won’t be able to get such high numbers with each blast, but it’s certainly done well the last five times.
My last recent example is an enewsletter we use to promote content on our site. We’ve got a pretty good list established for this weekly newsletter and we have a very strong open rate. Over the last several months, we’ve seen this email become the single biggest traffic driver on our site. It’s great, whatever we feature seems to become the hot item on our site.
Yes, I’m resigned to using email until it stops working, but I don’t have to like it.
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